Correction: Intrinsic motivation for choice varies with individual risk attitudes and the controllability of the environment.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.

Can we tackle climate change by behavioral hacking of the dopaminergic system?

Climate change is an undeniable fact that will certainly affect millions of people in the following decades. Despite this danger threatening our economies, wellbeing and our lives in general, there is a lack of immediate response at both the institutional and individual level. How can it be that the human brain cannot interpret this threat and act against it to avoid the immense negative consequences that may ensue? Here we argue that this paradox could be explained by the fact that some key brain mechanisms are potentially poorly tuned to take action against a threat that would take full effect only in the long-term.

The Geometry of Abstraction in the Hippocampus and Prefrontal Cortex.

The curse of dimensionality plagues models of reinforcement learning and decision making. The process of abstraction solves this by constructing variables describing features shared by different instances, reducing dimensionality and enabling generalization in novel situations. Here, we characterized neural representations in monkeys performing a task described by different hidden and explicit variables.

The role of the posterior parietal cortex in saccadic error processing.

Ocular saccades rapidly displace the fovea from one point of interest to another, thus minimizing the loss of visual information and ensuring the seamless continuity of visual perception. However, because of intrinsic variability in sensory-motor processing, saccades often miss their intended target, necessitating a secondary corrective saccade. Behavioral evidence suggests that the oculomotor system estimates saccadic error by relying on two sources of information: the retinal feedback obtained post-saccadically and an internal extra-retinal signal obtained from efference copy or proprioception.

Social Hierarchy Representation in the Primate Amygdala Reflects the Emotional Ambiguity of Our Social Interactions.

Group living can help individuals defend against predators and acquire nutrition. However, conflicts between group members can arise (food sharing, mating, etc), requiring individuals to know the social status of each member to promote survival. In our recent paper, we sought to understand how the brain represents the social status of monkeys living in the same colony.

Shared neural coding for social hierarchy and reward value in primate amygdala.

The social brain hypothesis posits that dedicated neural systems process social information. In support of this, neurophysiological data have shown that some brain regions are specialized for representing faces. It remains unknown, however, whether distinct anatomical substrates also represent more complex social variables, such as the hierarchical rank of individuals within a social group.

Optimal sensorimotor control in eye movement sequences.

Fast and accurate motor behavior requires combining noisy and delayed sensory information with knowledge of self-generated body motion; much evidence indicates that humans do this in a near-optimal manner during arm movements. However, it is unclear whether this principle applies to eye movements. We measured the relative contributions of visual sensory feedback and the motor efference copy (and/or proprioceptive feedback) when humans perform two saccades in rapid succession, the first saccade to a visual target and the second to a memorized target.