PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Arseny Finkelstein
AU  - Lorenzo Fontolan
AU  - Michael N. Economo
AU  - Nuo Li
AU  - Sandro Romani
AU  - Karel Svoboda
TI  - Attractor dynamics gate cortical information flow during decision-making
AID  - 10.1101/2019.12.14.876425
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2019.12.14.876425
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/12/15/2019.12.14.876425.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/12/15/2019.12.14.876425.full
AB  - Decisions about future actions are held in memory until enacted, making them vulnerable to distractors. The neural mechanisms controlling decision robustness to distractors remain unknown. We trained mice to report optogenetic stimulation of somatosensory cortex, with a delay separating sensation and action. Distracting stimuli influenced behavior less when delivered later during delay – demonstrating temporal gating of sensory information flow. Gating occurred even though distractor-evoked activity percolated through the cortex without attenuation. Instead, choice-related dynamics in frontal cortex became progressively robust to distractors as time passed. Reverse-engineering of neural networks trained to reproduce frontal-cortex activity revealed that chosen actions were stabilized via attractor dynamics, which gated out distracting stimuli. Our results reveal a dynamic gating mechanism that operates by controlling the degree of commitment to a chosen course of action.One Sentence Summary Mechanisms controlling state-dependent communication between brain regions allow for robust action-selection.