Post-decision processing in primate prefrontal cortex influences subsequent choices on an auditory decision-making task

Abstract
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Abstract

Perceptual decisions do not occur in isolation but instead reflect ongoing evaluation and adjustment processes that can affect future decisions. However, the neuronal substrates of these across-decision processes are not well understood, particularly for auditory decisions. We measured and manipulated the activity of choice-selective neurons in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) while monkeys made decisions about the frequency content of noisy auditory stimuli. As the decision was being formed, vlPFC activity was not modulated strongly by the task. However, after decision commitment, vlPFC population activity encoded the sensory evidence, choice, and outcome of the current trial and predicted subject-specific choice biases on the subsequent trial. Consistent with these patterns of neuronal activity, electrical microstimulation in vlPFC tended to affect the subsequent, but not current, decision. Thus, distributed post-commitment representations of graded decision-related information in prefrontal cortex can play a causal role in evaluating past decisions and biasing subsequent ones.

Data availability

The data analyses were performed in Matlab; this code is available https://github.com/CohenAuditoryLab/Joji.

Article and author information

Author details

Joji Tsunada

Department of Otorhinolaryngology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Yale Cohen

Department of Otorhinolaryngology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States

For correspondence
ycohen@pennmedicine.upenn.edu

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-0830-5162
Joshua I Gold

Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States

Competing interests
Joshua I Gold, Reviewing editor, eLife.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-6018-0483

Funding

National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (DC009224)

Yale Cohen

National Eye Institute (MH115557)

Joshua I Gold

National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (DC012961)

Yale Cohen

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Animal experimentation: The University of Pennsylvania Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee approved all of the experimental protocols, which were conducted under protocol 804699.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.