Ramping dynamics and theta oscillations reflect dissociable signatures during rule-guided human behavior

Contextual cues and prior evidence guide human goal-directed behavior. The neurophysiological mechanisms that implement contextual priors to guide subsequent actions in the human brain remain unclear. Using intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), we demonstrate that increasing uncertainty introd...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2024-01, Vol.15 (1), p.637-637, Article 637
Main Authors: Weber, Jan, Solbakk, Anne-Kristin, Blenkmann, Alejandro O., Llorens, Anais, Funderud, Ingrid, Leske, Sabine, Larsson, Pål Gunnar, Ivanovic, Jugoslav, Knight, Robert T., Endestad, Tor, Helfrich, Randolph F.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/378/116/2395
631/378/2649/2150
9/26
9/30
Accuracy
Behavior
Brain
Brain - physiology
Cognitive ability
Cues
Dynamics
EEG
Electrodes
Electroencephalography
Epilepsy
Human behavior
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Hypotheses
multidisciplinary
Neural coding
Oscillations
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Signatures
Subspaces
Theta Rhythm - physiology
Theta rhythms
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Summary:Contextual cues and prior evidence guide human goal-directed behavior. The neurophysiological mechanisms that implement contextual priors to guide subsequent actions in the human brain remain unclear. Using intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), we demonstrate that increasing uncertainty introduces a shift from a purely oscillatory to a mixed processing regime with an additional ramping component. Oscillatory and ramping dynamics reflect dissociable signatures, which likely differentially contribute to the encoding and transfer of different cognitive variables in a cue-guided motor task. The results support the idea that prefrontal activity encodes rules and ensuing actions in distinct coding subspaces, while theta oscillations synchronize the prefrontal-motor network, possibly to guide action execution. Collectively, our results reveal how two key features of large-scale neural population activity, namely continuous ramping dynamics and oscillatory synchrony, jointly support rule-guided human behavior. The authors show that neuronal populations in the human prefrontal-motor network interact via two discernible communication modes – ramping dynamics and neural oscillations. These modes operate in concert to facilitate rule-guided behavior.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-023-44571-7