Sebastijan Veselic

1/n With Cosyne around the corner, I thought I would: a) make a thread about our “A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the vmPFC” Cell paper (i'm a bit late). shorturl.at/DBA3H

21/ It goes without saying this work is the child of a lot of years of hard work by a lot of very talented and amazing people: @timothymulleridonthaveyourtag @elena-gtrrz.bsky.social @lhuntneuro.bsky.social @behrenstimb.bsky.social @idontthinkjamesandstevehavebluesky

1/n With Cosyne around the corner, I thought I would: a) make a thread about our “A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the vmPFC” Cell paper (i'm a bit late). shorturl.at/DBA3H

19/ ... value-based decision-making focused on the frontal lobe and spatial navigation research focused on the temporal lobe, and describe them in a more parsimonious way It seems both rely on deeply overlapping computations (it’s almost as if the lobes were anatomically connected).

1/n With Cosyne around the corner, I thought I would: a) make a thread about our “A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the vmPFC” Cell paper (i'm a bit late). shorturl.at/DBA3H

17/ Rodent work has shown neural replay in mPFC [Kaeffer 2020 Neuron] and ppl have also reported ripples in mPFC [Khodagholy 2017 Science] We didn't have enough cells on a per-session basis to look for funkier replay-like patterns in our data, but this made us think ...

1/n With Cosyne around the corner, I thought I would: a) make a thread about our “A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the vmPFC” Cell paper (i'm a bit late). shorturl.at/DBA3H

15/ ... to the generation and transformation of these representations to support economic choice on a trial by trial basis ... However. The RTs in this task were really quick so it's difficult to conclude this was *exclusively* theta-related. We're still looking into this with a lot more data now

1/n With Cosyne around the corner, I thought I would: a) make a thread about our “A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the vmPFC” Cell paper (i'm a bit late). shorturl.at/DBA3H

13/ ... the vmPFC cell population had a rhythmic firing pattern: So you may not be surprised to hear that the same hex signals we found in the LFP were also there in cells ...

1/n With Cosyne around the corner, I thought I would: a) make a thread about our “A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the vmPFC” Cell paper (i'm a bit late). shorturl.at/DBA3H

11/ This is exciting because our LFP hex signals behaved similarly to what you’d expect from grid cells, providing additional face validity for the hex signals people have been reporting for the last 16 years. We also obviously looked at what was going on in the cells across the brain regions.

1/n With Cosyne around the corner, I thought I would: a) make a thread about our “A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the vmPFC” Cell paper (i'm a bit late). shorturl.at/DBA3H

9/ In the simultaneous dataset, stimulus sets changed frequently. Subjects had to learn image --> magnitude/probability associations every couple of days in a separate task (if you are interested in value learning dynamics in this separate task, stay tuned for a preprint soon (wink wink))

1/n With Cosyne around the corner, I thought I would: a) make a thread about our “A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the vmPFC” Cell paper (i'm a bit late). shorturl.at/DBA3H

7/ These hexagonal periodic code have been thought to arise from grid cells (which some people think are related to cognitive maps) We find these codes in 2 datasets where options were presented simultaneously or sequentially. In both, the code was present in LFP θ frequency (hi θθθ gang)

1/n With Cosyne around the corner, I thought I would: a) make a thread about our “A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the vmPFC” Cell paper (i'm a bit late). shorturl.at/DBA3H

5/n ... and figuring this out may bring us closer to a cellular blueprint for understanding how PFC organizes abstract knowledge *and* uses it during choice. But this requires ephys with the electrodes in the right brain regions ... which we happened to have had lying around on some old USB stick.

1/n With Cosyne around the corner, I thought I would: a) make a thread about our “A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the vmPFC” Cell paper (i'm a bit late). shorturl.at/DBA3H

3/n A big neuroscience theme for the last 20 years has been the research of cognitive maps and grid codes. We even wrote a brief review for SFN, covering the evidence for these representations in PFC. shorturl.at/caQ3O In the Cell paper, we wanted to ask if we can frame choice as "navigation"

1/n With Cosyne around the corner, I thought I would: a) make a thread about our “A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the vmPFC” Cell paper (i'm a bit late). shorturl.at/DBA3H

1/ Excited to share that our symposium review covering cognitive mapping in the PFC just came out in the Journal of Neuroscience: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...

4/ We hope this review will provide a common anchor for interpreting what is happening in PFC across species. Because of the space constraints, we could not cover all the cool work that is going and focused on work relevant to the symposium :)

1/ Excited to share that our symposium review covering cognitive mapping in the PFC just came out in the Journal of Neuroscience: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...

2/ PFC is crucial for flexible behaviour but at the same time what it mechanistically does is not exactly clear. Our main goal with this review was to cover some of the key work that inspired this symposium and our own work.