Ramping dynamics and theta oscillations reflect dissociable signatures during rule-guided human behavior

abstract:

Contextual cues and prior evidence guide human goal-directed behavior. The neurophysiological mechanisms that implement contextual priors to guide subsequent actions in the human brain remain unclear. Using intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), we demonstrate that increasing uncertainty introduces a shift from a purely oscillatory to a mixed processing regime with an additional ramping component. Oscillatory and ramping dynamics reflect dissociable signatures, which likely differentially contribute to the encoding and transfer of different cognitive variables in a cue-guided motor task. The results support the idea that prefrontal activity encodes rules and ensuing actions in distinct coding subspaces, while theta oscillations synchronize the prefrontal-motor network, possibly to guide action execution. Collectively, our results reveal how two key features of large-scale neural population activity, namely continuous ramping dynamics and oscillatory synchrony, jointly support rule-guided human behavior.

Authors:

  • Jan Weber

  • Anne-Kristin Solbakk

  • Alejandro O. Blenkmann

  • Anais Llorens

  • Ingrid Funderud

  • Sabine Leske

  • Pål Gunnar Larsson

  • Lugoslav Ivanovic

  • Robert T. Knight

  • Tor Endestad

  • Randolph F. Helfrich

Date: 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-44571-7

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