Control of behavioral uncertainty by divergent frontal circuits

Both ambiguous inference from current input and internal belief from prior input causes uncertainty.
The uncertainty is typically manifested as a normal distribution at behavioral level when only current
inference is manipulated as variable. When prior belief is varying, some decision relevant neural
representations are dissociated. Under this circumstance, it is unclear how to describe the uncertainty
and how dissociated neural representations cooperate to control the uncertainty. By simulating an
unpredictable environment, which incurs conflicting valence-dependent prior beliefs, we found that a
behavioral outcome, waiting time, does not follow a normal, but a log-normal distribution. By combining
electrophysiological recordings, computational modeling, optogenetic manipulation, scRNA-seq and
MERFISH, we showed that the formation of this behavioral outcome requires the temporally hierarchical
cooperation of the neural representation of decision confidence and B230216N24Rik marked neural
representation of positive and negative belief in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). In summary, our
results provide a mechanistic link between the dynamics of valence-dependent prior beliefs and
behavioral uncertainty.

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