Still doing #neuroscience.

Our #orbitofrontalcortex (#OFC) paper published in _Neuron_ today. (Also available in #biorxiv.)

Paul Cunningham, A. David Redish (2025) Opposing, multiplexed information in lateral and ventral orbitofrontal cortex guides sequential foraging decisions in rats Neuron.

https://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(25)00467-2

Key insights:

1. VO and LO are doing opposite things: LO is about immediate value, while VO is about opportunity costs.

2. OFC neurons are representing both task state (through which neurons are active) and value (as the total activity).

I find this article by Ferro just out in nature communication https://rdcu.be/dOzT2 is an interesting intersection between value-based decision-making, embodied cognition/active vision, and memory #reactivation or #reinstatement. Looking is doing some heavy lifting. And lookie there, I didn't even mention the #orbitofrontalcortex recordings they did!

It caught my eye (sorry) b/c some of the scanpath analysis our lab's done in the past suggests that prior to looking at a remembered, rewarded visual target, there's an uptick in #hippocampal #ripples (Leonard et al., Current Biol 2017), which are thought to signal the underlying reactivation of task-relevant activity patterns. And of course, there's work by a number of groups on memory guidance to rewarding/goal targets, that rely on hippocampal function. Ours based on an MTL amnesic: Yoo, et al., (2020). Long-term memory and hippocampal function support predictive gaze control during goal-directed search. Journal of Vision, https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.20.5.10 following from Chau et al., 2011, and the changes in scanpaths and pupil responses of aging adults and people with Alzheimer's disease, too: Dragan, M. C.,et al., (2017). Behavioural Brain Research, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2016.09.014

Where we choose to look says so much: see e.g. Kragel/Voss; Castelhano/Henderson, Wynn/Buchsbaum/Olsen/Ryan esp what Jordana Wynn followed up with on the scanpath reinstatements suggests a really intertwined relationship between memory, eye movements, and learning/decisions about goals. (forgive that I'm missing many others and pls add below!)

TL;DR The foraging decision-making folks and the memory-guided vision folks need to be increasingly up in each other's business.

Here's that Ferro link:
https://rdcu.be/dOzT2

@cogneurophys