ArticlePLoS biology2020
Rules warp feature encoding in decision-making circuits.
Article in PLoS biology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sex-biased computations underlying differential set shift performance in mice.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Foraging models explain human exploration in uncertain tasks.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Dynamically Updated Task Rules Reshape Sensory Processing Across Cortical Hierarchies of the Posterior Parietal Cortex and Primary Auditory Cortex.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- Brain-wide arousal signals are segregated from movement planning in the superior colliculus of the macaque.eLife · 2026Article
- Perceptual response patterns in rhesus macaque attentional set shifting are associated with inflexible behavior.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Sex-specific behavioral feedback modulates sensorimotor processing and drives flexible social behavior.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Pupil size predicts exploration through critical slowing in prefrontal dynamics.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Individual differences in sequential decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Pupil size predicts the onset of exploration and changes in prefrontal dynamics.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Humans forage for reward in reinforcement learning tasks.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Dopamine and Norepinephrine Differentially Mediate the Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Irrational choices via a curvilinear representational geometry for value.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- The technology, opportunities, and challenges of Synthetic Biological Intelligence.Biotechnology advances · 2023Review
- The thalamus in psychosis spectrum disorder.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Cognition and the single neuron: How cell types construct the dynamic computations of frontal cortex.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2022Review
- Article
- Macaques preferentially attend to intermediately surprising information.Biology letters · 2022Article
- The Promise of Behavioral Tracking Systems for Advancing Primate Animal Welfare.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
We have the capacity to follow arbitrary stimulus-response rules, meaning simple policies that guide our behavior. Rule identity is broadly encoded across decision-making circuits, but there are less data on how rules shape the computations that lead to choices. One idea is that rules could simplify these computations. When we follow a rule, there is no need to encode or compute information that is irrelevant to the current rule, which could reduce the metabolic or energetic demands of decision-making. However, it is not clear if the brain can actually take advantage of this computational simplicity. To test this idea, we recorded from neurons in 3 regions linked to decision-making, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), ventral striatum (VS), and dorsal striatum (DS), while macaques performed a rule-based decision-making task. Rule-based decisions were identified via modeling rules as the latent causes of decisions. This left us with a set of physically identical choices that maximized reward and information, but could not be explained by simple stimulus-response rules. Contrasting rule-based choices with these residual choices revealed that following rules (1) decreased the energetic cost of decision-making; and (2) expanded rule-relevant coding dimensions and compressed rule-irrelevant ones. Together, these results suggest that we use rules, in part, because they reduce the costs of decision-making through a distributed representational warping in decision-making circuits.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.