Medial Prefrontal Cortex Predicts Internally Driven Strategy Shifts

• Published in: Neuron (Cambridge, Mass.) Vol. 86; no. 1; pp. 331 - 340
• Main Authors: Schuck, Nicolas W., Gaschler, Robert, Wenke, Dorit, Heinzle, Jakob, Frensch, Peter A., Haynes, John-Dylan, Reverberi, Carlo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Inc 08-04-2015; Elsevier Limited
• Subjects: Adult; Attention - physiology; Behavior; Classification; Decision Making - physiology; Female; Functional Laterality; Grants; Humans; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Oxygen - blood; Photic Stimulation; Prefrontal Cortex - blood supply; Prefrontal Cortex - physiology; Reaction Time - physiology; ROC Curve; Studies; Support Vector Machine; Visual Perception - physiology; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0896-6273; 1097-4199
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.03.015

Many daily behaviors require us to actively focus on the current task and ignore all other distractions. Yet, ignoring everything else might hinder the ability to discover new ways to achieve the same goal. Here, we studied the neural mechanisms that support the spontaneous change to better strategies while an established strategy is executed. Multivariate neuroimaging analyses showed that before the spontaneous change to an alternative strategy, medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) encoded information that was irrelevant for the current strategy but necessary for the later strategy. Importantly, this neural effect was related to future behavioral changes: information encoding in MPFC was changed only in participants who eventually switched their strategy and started before the actual strategy change. This allowed us to predict spontaneous strategy shifts ahead of time. These findings suggest that MPFC might internally simulate alternative strategies and shed new light on the organization of PFC.
•Some participants show uninstructed and spontaneous strategy changes•MPFC signals allow prediction of strategy shifts ahead of time•Otherwise suppressed signals are encoded in MPFC, allowing flexible task updating•Unsupervised learning can trigger changes in cognitive control
Schuck et al. show that before humans spontaneously change to a novel strategy, medial prefrontal cortex begins encoding sensory information only relevant for the new strategy. This allowed predicting the spontaneous strategy change from neuroimaging data ahead of time.