Citation

Fu Z, Beam D, Chung JM, Reed CM, Mamelak AN, Adolphs R, Rutishauser U. Science 2022; 376(6593): eabm9922.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, American Association for the Advancement of Science)

DOI

10.1126/science.abm9922

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

What are the neural mechanisms that enable humans to flexibly control and monitor their own actions in various non-routine and novel tasks? Fu et al. recorded the activity of more than 1000 neurons in the medial frontal cortex of human epilepsy patients while they performed complex cognitive tasks. They found that domain-general and domain-specific performance monitoring neurons were intermixed within this brain region. The population activity gave rise to a geometry that allowed domain-general signals to be read out with more than 90% accuracy on single trials while at the same time retaining the ability to separate different conflict conditions. These results show how the human medial frontal cortex resolves the fundamental trade-off between task generalization and specialization, which is critical for cognitive flexibility