Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Department of Neuroscience, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA; Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Department of Neuroscience, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA; Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA; Kavli Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Neuron. 2022 Oct 5;110(19):3206-3215.e5. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2022.07.019. Epub 2022 Aug 22.
Neurons in the lateral intraparietal cortex represent the formation of a decision when it is linked to a specific action, such as an eye movement to a choice target. However, these neurons should be unable to represent a decision that transpires across actions that would disrupt this linkage. We investigated this limitation by simultaneously recording many neurons from two rhesus monkeys. Although intervening actions disrupt the representation by single neurons, the ensemble achieves continuity of the decision process by passing information from currently active neurons to neurons that will become active after the action. In this way, the representation of an evolving decision can be generalized across actions and transcends the frame of reference that specifies the neural response fields. The finding extends previous observations of receptive field remapping, thought to support the stability of perception across eye movements, to the continuity of a thought process, such as a decision.
外侧顶内沟中的神经元在与特定动作（例如眼睛向选择目标移动）相关联时会对决策进行编码。然而，当这些决策跨越会破坏这种关联的动作时，这些神经元应该无法对决策进行编码。我们通过同时记录两只猕猴的许多神经元来研究这种限制。尽管中间动作会破坏单个神经元的表示，但通过将信息从当前活跃的神经元传递到动作后将活跃的神经元，整体上可以实现决策过程的连续性。通过这种方式，可以将正在进行的决策的表示推广到多个动作中，并超越指定神经反应场的参考系。该发现将先前关于感受野重映射的观察结果（被认为支持在眼球运动中感知的稳定性）扩展到思维过程（例如决策）的连续性。
