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Updated: Jul 16, 2025

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Published on: September 10, 2018
A view-based decision mechanism for rewards in the primate amygdala
Fabian Grabenhorst1, Adrián Ponce-Alvarez2, Alexandra Battaglia-Mayer3
1Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Mansfield Road, Oxford OX1 3TA, UK; Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3DY, UK.
None:
Primates make decisions visually by shifting their view from one object to the next, comparing values between objects, and choosing the best reward, even before acting. Here, we show that when monkeys make value-guided choices, amygdala neurons encode their decisions in an abstract, purely internal representation defined by the monkey's current view but not by specific object or reward properties. Across amygdala subdivisions, recorded activity patterns evolved gradually from an object-specific value code to a transient, object-independent code in which currently viewed and last-viewed objects competed to reflect the emerging view-based choice. Using neural-network modeling, we identified a sequence of computations by which amygdala neurons implemented view-based decision making and eventually recovered the chosen object's identity when the monkeys acted on their choice. These findings reveal a neural mechanism in the amygdala that derives object choices from abstract, view-based computations, suggesting an efficient solution for decision problems with many objects.
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