Department of Neuroscience and Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
Department of Neuroscience and Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
Neuron. 2022 Aug 3;110(15):2503-2511.e3. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2022.05.010. Epub 2022 Jun 13.
Natural decisions involve two seemingly separable processes: inferring the relevant task (task-belief) and performing the believed-relevant task. The assumed separability has led to the traditional practice of studying task-switching and perceptual decision-making individually. Here, we used a novel paradigm to manipulate and measure macaque monkeys' task-belief and demonstrated inextricable neuronal links between flexible task-belief and perceptual decision-making. We showed that in animals, but not in artificial networks that performed as well or better than the animals, stronger task-belief is associated with better perception. Correspondingly, recordings from neuronal populations in cortical areas 7a and V1 revealed that stronger task-belief is associated with better discriminability of the believed-relevant, but not the believed-irrelevant, feature. Perception also impacts belief updating; noise fluctuations in V1 help explain how task-belief is updated. Our results demonstrate that complex tasks and multi-area recordings can reveal fundamentally new principles of how biology affects behavior in health and disease.
推断相关任务（任务信念）和执行被认为相关的任务。这种假设的可分离性导致了传统上分别研究任务转换和知觉决策的做法。在这里，我们使用一种新的范式来操纵和测量猕猴的任务信念，并证明了灵活的任务信念和知觉决策之间存在不可分割的神经元联系。我们表明，在动物中，但不在表现得与动物一样好或更好的人工网络中，更强的任务信念与更好的感知相关。相应地，来自皮层区域 7a 和 V1 的神经元群体的记录表明，更强的任务信念与被认为相关的特征的更好可辨别性相关，而与被认为不相关的特征无关。感知也会影响信念更新；V1 中的噪声波动有助于解释任务信念是如何更新的。我们的结果表明，复杂任务和多区域记录可以揭示生物学如何在健康和疾病中影响行为的基本新原则。
