ArticleScience advances2021
How usefulness shapes neural representations during goal-directed behavior.
Article in Science advances, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Complementary and opponent value signals in the human brain support choosing the best and avoiding the worst.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- On the origin of the reward function: Exploring the role of conditioned reinforcement and social learning.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Factorized embedding of goal and uncertainty in the lateral prefrontal cortex guides stably flexible learning.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Using economic value signals from primate prefrontal cortex in neuro-engineering applications.Journal of neural engineering · 2025Article
- Subjective valuation as a domain-general process in creative thinking.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The geometry of efficient codes: How rate-distortion trade-offs distort the latent representations of generative models.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- The human reward system encodes the subjective value of ideas during creative thinking.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Context changes retrieval of prospective outcomes during decision deliberation.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Latent Learning Progress Drives Autonomous Goal Selection in Human Reinforcement Learning.Advances in neural information processing systems · 2024Article
- Goal commitment is supported by vmPFC through selective attention.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Functional specialization of medial and lateral orbitofrontal cortex in inferential decision-making.iScience · 2024Article
- The online metacognitive control of decisions.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Naturalistic reinforcement learning.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2024Review
- Goal-Dependent Hippocampal Representations Facilitate Self-Control.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Article
- Task state representations in vmPFC mediate relevant and irrelevant value signals and their behavioral influence.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Readiness to remember: predicting variability in episodic memory.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2022Review
- Filling the gaps: Cognitive control as a critical lens for understanding mechanisms of value-based decision-making.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022Review
- The whole prefrontal cortex is premotor cortex.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Value is often associated with reward, emphasizing its hedonic aspects. However, when circumstances change, value must also change (a compass outvalues gold, if you are lost). How are value representations in the brain reshaped under different behavioral goals? To answer this question, we devised a new task that decouples usefulness from its hedonic attributes, allowing us to study flexible goal-dependent mapping. Here, we show that, unlike sensory cortices, regions in the prefrontal cortex (PFC)-usually associated with value computation-remap their representation of perceptually identical items according to how useful the item has been to achieve a specific goal. Furthermore, we identify a coding scheme in the PFC that represents value regardless of the goal, thus supporting generalization across contexts. Our work questions the dominant view that equates value with reward, showing how a change in goals triggers a reorganization of the neural representation of value, enabling flexible behavior.
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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.