Prospective and retrospective values integrated in frontal cortex drive predictive choice

Abstract

Animals must flexibly estimate the value of their actions (action-value) to successfully adapt to a changing environment. The brain is thought to estimate action-values from two different sources, namely the action-outcome history (retrospective value) and the knowledge of the environment (prospective value), but how different estimates of action-values are reconciled to make a choice is not well understood. Here we found that as mice learn the state-transition structure of a decision-making task, retrospective and prospective values become jointly encoded in the preparatory activity of neurons in ALM. Suppressing this preparatory activity in expert mice returned their behavior to a naïve state. These results reveal the neural circuit that injects structural knowledge into action selection to promote predictive decision-making.