Natural decisions involve two seemingly separable processes: inferring the relevant task (task-belief) and performing the believed-relevant task. The assumed separability has led to the traditional practice of studying task-switching and perceptual decision-making individually. Here, we used a novel paradigm to manipulate and measure macaque monkeys’ task-belief and demonstrated inextricable neuronal links between flexible task-belief and perceptual decision-making. We showed that in animals, but not in artificial networks that performed as well or better than the animals, stronger task-belief is associated with better perception. Correspondingly, recordings from neuronal populations in cortical areas 7a and V1 revealed that stronger task-belief is associated with better discriminability of the believed-relevant, but not the believed-irrelevant, feature. Perception also impacts belief updating; noise fluctuations in V1 help explain how task-belief is updated. Our results demonstrate that complex tasks and multi-area recordings can reveal fundamentally new principles of how biology affects behavior in health and disease.

自然决策涉及两个看似可分离的过程：推断相关任务（任务信念）和执行相信相关的任务。假设的可分离性导致了单独研究任务切换和感知决策的传统实践。在这里，我们使用一种新颖的范式来操纵和测量猕猴的任务信念，并证明了灵活的任务信念和感知决策之间不可分割的神经元联系。我们证明，在动物中，更强的任务信念与更好的感知相关，但在表现与动物一样好或更好的人工网络中则不然。相应地，皮质区域 7a 和 V1 神经元群的记录显示，更强的任务信念与更好地区分所认为相关的特征相关，但与认为不相关的特征无关。感知也会影响信念的更新； V1 中的噪声波动有助于解释任务信念是如何更新的。我们的结果表明，复杂的任务和多区域记录可以揭示生物学如何影响健康和疾病行为的全新原理。