Prefrontal Cell Activities Related to Monkeys' Success and Failure in Adapting to Rule Changes in a Wisconsin Card Sorting Test Analog

By F. Mansouri, Kenji Matsumoto, Keiji Tanaka. 2006

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The cognitive flexibility to select appropriate rules in a changing environment is essential for survival and is assumed to depend on the integrity of prefrontal cortex (PFC). To explore the contribution of the dorsolateral PFC to flexible rule-based behavior, we recorded the activity of cells in this region of monkeys performing a Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) analog. The monkey had to match a sample to one of three test items by either color or shape. Liquid reward and a discrete visual signal (error signal) were given as feedback to correct and incorrect target selections, respectively. The relevant rule and its frequent changes were not cued, and the monkeys could find it only by interpreting the feedback. In one-third of cells, cellular activity was modulated by the relevant rule, both throughout the trial and between trials. The magnitude of the modulation correlated with the number of errors that the monkeys committed after each rule change in the course of reestablishing high performance. Activity of other cells differed between correct and error trials independently from the rule-related modulation. This difference appeared during actual responses and before the monkeys faced the problems. Many PFC cells responded to the error-signal presentation, and, in some of them, the magnitude of response depended on the relevant rule. These results suggest that the dorsolateral PFC contributes to WCST performance by maintaining the relevant rule across trials, assessing behavioral outcomes, and monitoring the processes that could lead to success and failure in individual trials.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

A modeling framework for adaptive lifelong learning with transfer and savings through gating in the prefrontal cortex (2020, background): “Studies in nonhuman primates with a WCST analog (6) and related task (20) have reported specific neural activity patterns associated with set-shifting, suggesting the possibility of direct comparisons to our model; a topic we are currently exploring.”
Abstract context representations in primate amygdala and prefrontal cortex (2015, result): “Previous studies have also noted that activity in PFC representing abstract rules does not differ on correct compared to error trials (Mansouri et al., 2006).”
Integration of cognitive and motivational context information in the primate prefrontal cortex. (2007, background): “Cognitive context-representing neuronal activities (showing differential precue baseline activities) have also been reported in LPFC in multitask situations (Asaad et al. 2000; Wallis et al. 2001) and in the Wisconsin card sorting test analog (Mansouri et al. 2006).”
Why neurons mix: high dimensionality for higher cognition. (2016, background): “These responses encode multiple task-relevant variables that include rules, sensory stimuli identity or features, and motor responses or decisions [2–4,5 ,6 ,7–9,10 ,11 ,12 ].”
The importance of mixed selectivity in complex cognitive tasks (2013, background): “Specifically we found that (1) the populations of recorded neurons encode distributed information that is not contained in classical selectivity to individual task aspects, (2) the recorded neural representations are high-dimensional, and (3) the dimensionality of the recorded neural representations”
Distinct neural oscillations predict individual differences in feedback-guided cognitive flexibility (2026, unknown): “…they are not explicitly instructed, is called task switching and has often been studied with the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) in humans ( Berg 1948; Barcelo 2003), monkeys ( Mansouri et al. 2006; Kuwabara et al. 2014) and recurrent neural networks in computational work ( Liu and Wang 2024).”
Distinct neural oscillations predict covert switching between stable and unstable cognitive representations (2025, unknown): “…when they are not explicitly instructed, is called task switching and has often been studied with the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) in humans (Barcelo, 2003; Berg, 1948), monkeys (Kuwabara et al., 2014; Mansouri et al., 2006) and recurrent neural networks in computational (Liu & Wang, 2024).”