Animals adaptively integrate sensation, planning, and action to navigate toward goal locations in ever-changing environments, but the functional organization of cortex supporting these processes remains unclear. We characterized encoding in approximately 90,000 neurons across the mouse posterior cortex during a virtual navigation task with rule switching. The encoding of task and behavioral variables was highly distributed across cortical areas but differed in magnitude, resulting in three spatial gradients for visual cue, spatial position plus dynamics of choice formation, and locomotion, with peaks respectively in visual, retrosplenial, and parietal cortices. Surprisingly, the conjunctive encoding of these variables in single neurons was similar throughout the posterior cortex, creating high-dimensional representations in all areas instead of revealing computations specialized for each area. We propose that, for guiding navigation decisions, the posterior cortex operates in parallel rather than hierarchically, and collectively generates a state representation of the behavior and environment, with each area specialized in handling distinct information modalities.

动物适应性地整合感觉、计划和行动，以在不断变化的环境中导航至目标位置，但支持这些过程的皮层功能组织仍不清楚。我们在进行规则切换的虚拟导航任务期间，对小鼠后皮质中约 90,000 个神经元的编码进行了表征。任务和行为变量的编码高度分布在皮质区域，但大小不同，导致视觉线索、空间位置加上选择形成动态和运动的三个空间梯度，分别在视觉、压后皮质和顶叶皮质中达到峰值。令人惊讶的是，单个神经元中这些变量的联合编码在整个后皮层中是相似的，在所有区域中创建高维表示，而不是揭示专门针对每个区域的计算。我们提出，为了指导导航决策，后皮层并行而不是分层运行，并共同生成行为和环境的状态表示，每个区域专门处理不同的信息模式。