Spatial Processing Enhancement in the Prefrontal Cortex for Rapid Detection of Valuable Objects

Journal of Neuroscience April 16, 2025

Rapid detection of rewarding objects can be essential for survival and reproduction in real life. However, finding valuable

objects, among many others, can be time-consuming and slow. In this work, we reveal reward-related changes in the receptive

fields of neurons within the prefrontal cortex of macaque monkeys that help them find valuable objects more efficiently. Such

reward-related plasticity is shown to develop slowly for objects that are consistently associated with reward and challenges

current theories of efficient search based on low-level visual features alone.