Abstract:
The human prefrontal cortex (PFC) constitutes the structural basis underlying flexible cognitive control, where mixed-selective neural populations encode multiple task features to guide subsequent behavior. The mechanisms by which the brain simultaneously encodes multiple task–relevant variables while minimizing interference from task-irrelevant features remain unknown. Leveraging intracranial recordings from the human PFC, we first demonstrate that competition between coexisting representations of past and present task variables incurs a behavioral switch cost. Our results reveal that this interference between past and present states in the PFC is resolved through coding partitioning into distinct low-dimensional neural states; thereby strongly attenuating behavioral switch costs. In sum, these findings uncover a fundamental coding mechanism that constitutes a central building block of flexible cognitive control.
Authors:
Jan Weber
Gabriela Iwama
Anne-Kristin Solbakk
Alejandro O. Blenkmann
Pal G. Larsson
Jugoslav Ivanovic
Robert T. Knight
Tor Endestad
Randolph Helfrich
Date: 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2220523120