Redwood Neuroscience
Title: “Foraging for cortical reward signals:
behavior, modeling, and electrophysiology”
Greg
Corrado
Neuroscience
Department
Abstract:
To forage successfully animals must maintain an
internal representation of the value or utility of competing options and link that
representation to the neural processes responsible for decision- making and
action implementation. In this lecture I
will outline a general approach to the electrophysiological study of
value-based choice in awake, behaving monkeys.
This approach has three key components: first, demonstrating that
behavior is under the control of an animal’s history of choices and rewards;
second, modeling behavioral data to gain insight into the decision variables that specify the
animal’s choices; and third, analyzing electrophysiological signals to
determine if and how these decision variables
are encoded within specific neural systems.
I will discuss how we have applied this approach to
study choice behavior and related neural activity in rhesus monkeys engaged in
a dynamic foraging game. This work
demonstrates the efficacy of a simple Linear-Nonlinear-Poisson framework in
producing successful predictive and generative models of animal foraging
behavior that in turn provide useful candidate decision variables for neurophysiological investigation. To date our physiological experiments have
focused on exploring neural signals in each of two areas of cortex that are implicated
in reward processing or higher order motor planning. I will discuss the results of single cell recording
experiments conducted in these areas while monkeys engaged
in this foraging game, and what these results suggest
about the respective roles of these areas in value-based decision making.