2023/07/03 by Jan Weber, Gabriela Yukari Iwama, Anne‐Kristin Solbakk +6 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Neuroscience · #Functional Brain Connectivity Studies #Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies #Neural dynamics and brain function
paper · doi:10.1073/pnas.2220523120
openalex publication_date 2023/07/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The human prefrontal cortex (PFC) constitutes the structural basis underlying flexible cognitive control, where mixed-selective neural populations encode multiple task features to guide subsequent behavior. The mechanisms by which the brain simultaneously encodes multiple task-relevant variables while minimizing interference from task-irrelevant features remain unknown. Leveraging intracranial recordings from the human PFC, we first demonstrate that competition between coexisting representations of past and present task variables incurs a behavioral switch cost. Our results reveal that this interference between past and present states in the PFC is resolved through coding partitioning into distinct low-dimensional neural states; thereby strongly attenuating behavioral switch costs. In sum, these findings uncover a fundamental coding mechanism that constitutes a central building block of flexible cognitive control.