The prefrontal cortex maintains working memory information in the presence of distracting stimuli. It has long been thought that sustained activity in individual neurons or groups of neurons was responsible for maintaining information in the form of a persistent, stable code. Here we show that, upon the presentation of a distractor, information in the lateral prefrontal cortex was reorganized into a different pattern of activity to create a morphed stable code without losing information. In contrast, the code in the frontal eye fields persisted across different delay periods but exhibited substantial instability and information loss after the presentation of a distractor. We found that neurons with mixed-selective responses were necessary and sufficient for the morphing of code and that these neurons were more abundant in the lateral prefrontal cortex than the frontal eye fields. This suggests that mixed selectivity provides populations with code-morphing capability, a property that may underlie cognitive flexibility.

中文翻译：

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混合选择性使前额叶皮层中的种群代码变形。

前额叶皮层在分散注意力的刺激下维持工作记忆信息。长期以来，人们一直认为，单个神经元或神经元组的持续活动负责以持久，稳定的代码形式维护信息。在这里，我们表明，在出现牵张器的情况下，外侧前额叶皮层中的信息会重新组织为不同的活动模式，以创建变形的稳定代码而不会丢失信息。相比之下，额叶视野中的代码会在不同的延迟时间段内保持不变，但在出现干扰物后会表现出很大的不稳定性和信息丢失。我们发现，具有混合选择响应的神经元对于代码的变形是必要且充分的，并且这些神经元在额前外侧皮层中比额叶视野更丰富。这表明混合选择性为人群提供了代码变形能力，这可能是认知灵活性的基础。