Abstract
Animals likely use a variety of strategies to solve laboratory tasks. Traditionally, combined analysis of behavioral and neural recording data across subjects employing different strategies may obscure important signals and give confusing results. Hence it is important to develop techniques that can infer strategy at the single-subject level. We analyzed an experiment in which two monkeys perform a visually cued rule-based task. From the analysis of their performance there is no indication that they used a different strategy. However, when we examined the geometry of stimulus representations in the state space of the neural activities recorded in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, we found striking differences. Our purely neural results predict behavioral differences that we observed by analyzing the reaction times. These analyses provide strong support that the animals employed different strategies. Finally, we used a modeling study to correlate these strategies with the amount of training that the animals received.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
