PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Jan Weber
AU  - Gabriela Iwama
AU  - Anne-Kristin Solbakk
AU  - Alejandro O. Blenkmann
AU  - Pal G. Larsson
AU  - Jugoslav Ivanovic
AU  - Robert T. Knight
AU  - Tor Endestad
AU  - Randolph Helfrich
TI  - Subspace partitioning in human prefrontal cortex resolves cognitive interference
AID  - 10.1101/2022.11.16.516719
DP  - 2022 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2022.11.16.516719
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/11/16/2022.11.16.516719.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/11/16/2022.11.16.516719.full
AB  - Human prefrontal cortex (PFC) constitutes the structural basis underlying flexible cognitive control, where mixed-selective neural populations encode multiple task-features to guide subsequent behavior. The mechanisms by which the brain simultaneously encodes multiple task-relevant variables while minimizing interference from task-irrelevant features remain unknown. Leveraging intracranial recordings from the human PFC, we first demonstrate that competition between co-existing representations of past and present task variables incurs a behavioral switch cost. Our results reveal that this interference between past and present states in the PFC is resolved through coding partitioning into distinct low-dimensional neural states; thereby strongly attenuating behavioral switch costs. In sum, these findings uncover a fundamental coding mechanism that constitutes a central building block of flexible cognitive control.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.