Contributed Talk Sessions | Poster Sessions | All Posters | Search Papers

Poster Session B: Wednesday, August 13, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Mechanism of learning and inference in the prefrontal cortex

Shuyi Luo¹, Ali Mahmoodi, Matthew Rushworth; ¹University of Oxford

Presenter: Shuyi Luo

Despite causal relationships being inherently unobservable in a direct manner, people can infer these relationships with limited data. Using a one-shot causal inference task with fMRI, we investigated the inference process at both behavioural and neural levels. Our findings reveal that participants integrated observed causal evidence with their prior beliefs about the underlying causal structures that prevailed in the world to infer unobservable causal relationships. This process engaged a midbrain region linked to dopamine and learning but also a specific and circumscribed region of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) in which activity was related to several aspects of the inference process.

Topic Area: Predictive Processing & Cognitive Control

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF