Representational Switching by Dynamical Reorganization of Attractor Structure in a Network Model of the Prefrontal Cortex

Yuichi Katori, Kazuhiro Sakamoto, Naohiro Saito, Jun Tanji, Hajime Mushiake, Kazuyuki Aihara

Abstract: Author Summary The prefrontal cortex plays a highly flexible role in various cognitive tasks e.g., decision making and action planning. Neurons in the prefrontal cortex exhibit flexible representation or selectivity for task relevant information and are involved in working memory with sustained activity, which can be modeled as attractor dynamics. Moreover, recent experiments revealed that prefrontal neurons not only represent parametric or discrete sets of information but also switch the representation and transform a set of information to another set in order to match the context of the required task. However, underlying mechanisms of this flexible representational switching are unknown. Here we propose a dynamically reorganizable attractor network model in which short-term modulation of the synaptic connections reconfigures the structure of neural attractors by assembly and disassembly of a network of cells to produce flexible attractor dynamics. On the basis of computer simulation as well as theoretical analysis, we showed that this model reproduced experimentally demonstrated representational switching, and that switching on certain characteristic axes defining neural dynamics well describes the essence of the representational switching. This model has the potential to provide unique insights about the flexible information representations and processing in the cortical network.