Ricerc@Sapienza

Beyond average firing rate, other measurable signals of neuronal activity are fundamental to an understanding of behavior. Recently, hidden Markov models (HMMs) have been applied to neural recordings and have described how neuronal ensembles process information by going through sequences of different states. Such collective dynamics are impossible to capture by just looking at the average firing rate. To estimate how well HMMs can decode information contained in single trials, we compared HMMs with a recently developed classification method based on the peristimulus time histogram (PSTH).

We can adapt flexibly to environment changes and search for the most appropriate rule to a context. The orbital prefrontal cortex (PFo) has been associated with decision making, rule generation and maintenance, and more generally has been considered important for behavioral flexibility. To better understand the neural mechanisms underlying the flexible behavior, we studied the ability to generate a switching signal in monkey PFo when a strategy is changed.

Predicting the behavior of others is a fundamental skill in primate social life. We tested the role of medial frontal cortex in the prediction of other agents' behavior in two male macaques, using a monkey-human interactive task in which their actor-observer roles were intermixed. In every trial, the observer monitored the actor's choice to reject it for a different one when he became the actor on the subsequent trial.

The estimation of space and time can interfere with each other, and neuroimaging studies have shown overlapping activation in the parietal and prefrontal cortical areas. We used duration and distance discrimination tasks to determine whether space and time share resources in prefrontal cortex (PF) neurons. Monkeys were required to report which of two stimuli, a red circle or blue square, presented sequentially, were longer and farther, respectively, in the duration and distance tasks.