Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex drives strategic aborting by optimizing long-run policy extraction.

Real world choices often involve balancing decisions that are optimized for the short-vs. long-term. Here, we reason that apparently sub-optimal single trial decisions in macaques may in fact reflect long-term, strategic planning.

Inductive biases of neural network modularity in spatial navigation.

The brain may have evolved a modular architecture for daily tasks, with circuits featuring functionally specialized modules that match the task structure. We hypothesize that this architecture enables better learning and generalization than architectures with less specialized modules. To test this, we trained reinforcement learning agents with various neural architectures on a naturalistic navigation task.

Context-invariant beliefs are supported by dynamic reconfiguration of single unit functional connectivity in prefrontal cortex of male macaques.

Natural behaviors occur in closed action-perception loops and are supported by dynamic and flexible beliefs abstracted away from our immediate sensory milieu. How this real-world flexibility is instantiated in neural circuits remains unknown. Here, we have male macaques navigate in a virtual environment by primarily leveraging sensory (optic flow) signals, or by more heavily relying on acquired internal models.

A common computational and neural anomaly across mouse models of autism.

Computational psychiatry has suggested that humans within the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) inflexibly update their expectations (i.e., Bayesian priors).

Belief embodiment through eye movements facilitates memory-guided navigation.

Neural network models optimized for task performance often excel at predicting neural activity but do not explain other properties such as the distributed representation across functionally distinct areas. Distributed representations may arise from animals' strategies for resource utilization, however, fixation-based paradigms deprive animals of a vital resource: eye movements. During a naturalistic task in which humans use a joystick to steer and catch flashing fireflies in a virtual environment lacking position cues, subjects physically track the latent task variable with their gaze.