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Structure and origin of complex cortical activity during decision making

Frontal cortex activity contains a mixture of signals for different behavioral and cognitive processes. Analysis of 20,000 frontal cortical neurons during a tactile decision-making task revealed functional clusters encoding specific behavioral variables. By manipulating the inputs to frontal cortex, we attributed the origin of their activities to inputs from the thalamus.

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Fig. 1: Diverse activity in frontal cortex neurons and its dependence on the thalamus.

References

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This is a summary of: Yang, W., Tipparaju, S. L., Chen, G. & Li, N. Thalamus-driven functional populations in frontal cortex support decision-making. Nat. Neurosci. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-022-01171-w (2022).

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Structure and origin of complex cortical activity during decision making. Nat Neurosci 25, 1255–1256 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-022-01173-8

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