CNI Seminar: Nicolas Schuck

Nicolas Schuck, Princeton Neuroscience Institute


Human Orbitofrontal Cortex Represents a Cognitive Map of State Space

If Bob would buy or sell his stocks based on whether he sees his neighbor walking the dog or not, he won’t be very successful. Obviously, making a choice based on the wrong information will lead to wrong decisions. Reinforcement learning presupposes a compilation of all decision-relevant information into a single Markovian “state” of the environment. Where do these states reside in the human brain? We have previously hypothesized that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) may play a key role in representing task states, especially when these are partially observable. Here we test this idea in humans, using multivariate decoding and representational similarity analysis of fMRI signals. In line with our hypothesis, we find evidence for a state representation in OFC. Moreover, we show that the fidelity of the state information in OFC, and the similarity between different states as they are represented neurally, robustly relate to performance differences. Our results suggest that internal state representations can be “read out” for a variety of tasks, and indicate that the geometry of the individual state space can be used to make predictions about individual performance characteristics.

A pizza lunch will be served at 12:00pm. The lecture will begin at 12:15pm.