Title: Attention and value encoding in the prefrontal cortex

Speaker: Prof. Tianming Yang, Institute of Neuroscience, China

Time: 13:00-15:00, November 16, 2018

Location: Room 1113, Wang Kezhen Building

Abstract:

Attention and value are two tightly related factors that affect our cognition and decision making. In this talk, I will discuss how attention interacts with the value encoding in the prefrontal cortex. We will focus our discussion on the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which has been suggested to encode value during value-based decision making. The new experiments from our lab show that the OFC neurons encode the value only one stimulus at a time, and attention is the guiding signal that chooses the stimulus. Attention modulates OFC activity through a winner-take-all mechanism and can be explained by a normalization model. In comparison, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex encodes the value of both the attended and the unattended stimuli. Our results provide important insights toward the neural mechanism of value-based decision making.

Host PI: Dr. Lusha Zhu