Memory-guided deliberate decision making in rat prefrontal cortex

Decisions can either be nonconscious or deliberate. While nonconscious actions are easy to see as a reflex, conditioning, or skill acquisition consequence, one may underappreciate the complexities involving everyday deliberate decision making. The process of deliberation entails searching and weighing through possibilities. The search space for these possibilities is built via latent learning into abstract model (or schema) of task structure which computes interdependencies between different contexts, stimuli, actions, and subsequent rewards. Prefrontal cortex (PFC) is implicated to employ such schema to guide behavioral choices. Maintenance and utilization of such abstract models can be achieved by reflective (e.g., replay, counterfactual, credit assignment, etc.) and prospective thinking processes (e.g., episodic future thinking (EFT) or vicarious trial & error (VTE), preplay etc.). Both hippocampus and prefrontal cortex are critically involved in all these processes.