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Learning of distant state predictions by the orbitofrontal cortex in humans

Wimmer, GE; Büchel, C; (2019) Learning of distant state predictions by the orbitofrontal cortex in humans. Nature Communications , 10 , Article 2554. 10.1038/s41467-019-10597-z. Green open access

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Abstract

Representations of our future environment are essential for planning and decision making. Previous research in humans has demonstrated that the hippocampus is a critical region for forming and retrieving associations, while the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is an important region for representing information about recent states. However, it is not clear how the brain acquires predictive representations during goal-directed learning. Here, we show using fMRI that while participants learned to find rewards in multiple different Y-maze environments, hippocampal activity was highest during initial exposure and then decayed across the remaining repetitions of each maze, consistent with a role in rapid encoding. Importantly, multivariate patterns in the OFC-VPFC came to represent predictive information about upcoming states approximately 30 s in the future. Our findings provide a mechanism by which the brain can build models of the world that span long-timescales to make predictions.

Type: Article
Title: Learning of distant state predictions by the orbitofrontal cortex in humans
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-10597-z
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10597-z
Language: English
Additional information: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords: Learning algorithms, Learning and memory, Neural decoding, Problem solving
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology > Imaging Neuroscience
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10076926
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