Shared Neural Activity But Distinct Neural Dynamics for Cognitive Control in Monkey Prefrontal and Parietal Cortex.

To better understand how prefrontal networks mediate forms of cognitive control disrupted in schizophrenia, we translated a variant of the AX continuous performance task (AX-CPT) that measures specific deficits in the human disease to two male monkeys and recorded neurons in prefrontal and parietal cortex during task performance. In the task, contextual information instructed by cue stimuli determines the response required to a subsequent probe stimulus. We found parietal neurons encoding the behavioral context instructed by cues that exhibited nearly identical activity to their prefrontal counterparts (Blackman et al., 2016). This neural population switched their preference for stimuli over the course of the trial depending on whether the stimuli signaled the need to engage cognitive control to override a prepotent response. Cues evoked visual responses that appeared in parietal neurons first, whereas population activity encoding contextual information instructed by cues was stronger and more persistent in prefrontal cortex. Increasing cognitive control demand biased the representation of contextual information toward the prefrontal cortex and augmented the temporal correlation of task-defined information encoded by neurons in the two areas. Oscillatory dynamics in local field potentials differed between cortical areas and carried as much information about task conditions as spike rates. We found that at the single neuron level, patterns of activity evoked by the task were nearly identical between the two cortical areas. Nonetheless, distinct population dynamics in prefrontal and parietal cortex were evident suggesting differential contributions to cognitive control. Significance Statement: We recorded neural activity in prefrontal and parietal cortex of monkeys performing a task that measures cognitive control deficits in schizophrenia. This allowed us to characterize computations performed by neurons in both areas to support forms of cognitive control disrupted in the disease. Subpopulations of neurons in the two areas exhibited parallel modulations in firing rate, and as a result, all patterns of task evoked activity were distributed between prefrontal and parietal cortex. This included the presence in both cortical areas of neurons reflecting proactive and reactive cognitive control dissociated from stimuli or responses in the task. However, differences in the timing, strength, synchrony, and correlation of information encoded by neural activity were evident indicating differential contributions to cognitive control.