Dynamic tracking of objects in the macaque dorsomedial frontal cortex.

A central tenet of cognitive neuroscience is that humans build an internal model of the external world and use mental simulation of the model to perform physical inferences. Decades of human experiments have shown that behaviors in many physical reasoning tasks are consistent with predictions from the mental simulation theory. However, evidence for the defining feature of mental simulation - that neural population dynamics reflect simulations of physical states in the environment - is limited.

Sensory History Drives Adaptive Neural Geometry in LP/Pulvinar-Prefrontal Cortex Circuits.

Prior expectations guide attention and support perceptual filtering for efficient processing during decision-making. Here we show that during a visual discrimination task, mice adaptively use prior stimulus history to guide ongoing choices by estimating differences in evidence between consecutive trials (| Δ Dir |). The thalamic lateral posterior (LP)/pulvinar nucleus provides robust inputs to the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC), which has been implicated in selective attention and predictive processing, but the function of the LP-ACC projection is unknown.

Mental navigation in the primate entorhinal cortex.

A cognitive map is a suitably structured representation that enables novel computations using previous experience; for example, planning a new route in a familiar space. Work in mammals has found direct evidence for such representations in the presence of exogenous sensory inputs in both spatial and non-spatial domains. Here we tested a foundational postulate of the original cognitive map theory: that cognitive maps support endogenous computations without external input.