Reward acts as a signal to control delay-period activity in delayed-response tasks

Satoe Ichihara-Takeda, Kazuyoshi Takeda, Shintaro Funahashi*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Prefrontal delay-period activity represents a neural mechanism for the active maintenance of information and needs to be controlled by some signal to appropriately operate working memory. To examine whether reward-delivery acts as this signal, the effects of delay-period activity in response to unexpected reward-delivery were examined by analyzing single-neuron activity recorded in the primate dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Among neurons that showed delay-period activity, 34% showed inhibition of this activity in response to unexpected reward-delivery. The delay-period activity of these neurons was affected by the expectation of reward-delivery. The strength of the reward signal in controlling the delay-period activity is related to the strength of the effect of reward information on the delay-period activity. These results indicate that reward-delivery acts as a signal to control delay-period activity.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)367-370
Number of pages4
JournalNeuroReport
Volume21
Issue number5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2010
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Control signal
  • Delay-period activity
  • Delayed-response task
  • Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
  • Reward-related activity
  • Working memory

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