Talk title: Flexible representations for context-dependent behaviour

Abstract

The ability to guide decisions based on context is a key building block of intelligent behaviour. Abundant work has documented that context-dependent decisions rely on top-down signals that originate in prefrontal cortex and bias information processing to amplify contextually relevant information. However, the precise nature of these control signals, as well as the neural circuit mechanisms that generate them, remain a mystery. In this talk, I will present several studies that combine multivariate state space analyses of brain activity with explicit models of neural circuit computations to interrogate the nature of control signals that support flexible context-dependent decisions.