Activity in orbitofrontal neuronal ensembles reflects inhibitory control

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Decision Neuroscience

Background:

• Stopping, a form of self-control, is crucial for adaptive behavior but its neural basis is not fully understood.
• The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), involved in economic decisions, has a debated role in inhibition.
• Some theories suggest inhibition involves widespread information processing, potentially including reward regions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the role of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in neural mechanisms of stopping (inhibition).
• To identify neural activity patterns associated with successful versus failed inhibition.
• To determine if OFC activity encodes inhibition proactively and/or reactively.

Main Methods:

• Recorded single-neuron activity in the OFC of macaques performing a stop-signal task.
• Utilized ensemble decoding analyses to identify distinct neural firing rate patterns.
• Compared neural activity patterns related to inhibition with value encoding.

Main Results:

• Identified a neural firing rate pattern distinguishing successful from failed inhibition, emerging after the stop signal and before the stop-signal reaction time (SSRT).
• Discovered a separate, orthogonal neural pattern associated with successful stopping that appeared before the trial began.
• Demonstrated that these inhibition-related signals were distinct from and orthogonal to value encoding in the OFC.

Conclusions:

• Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) neuronal activity encodes inhibition both proactively and reactively.
• Distinct ensemble patterns in the OFC differentiate successful from failed stopping.
• Findings contribute to understanding the neural underpinnings of self-control and flexible behavior.