Neuronal activity in the posterior cingulate cortex signals environmental information and predicts behavioral variability during routine foraging

Animals engage in routine behavior in order to efficiently navigate their environments. This routine behavior may be influenced by the state of the environment, such as the location and size of rewards. The neural circuits tracking environmental information and how that information impacts decisions to diverge from routines remains unexplored. To investigate the representation of environmental information during routine foraging, we recorded the activity of single neurons in posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) in monkeys searching through an array of targets in which the location of rewards was unknown. Outside the laboratory, people and animals solve such traveling salesman problems by following routine traplines that connect nearest-neighbor locations. In our task, monkeys also deployed traplining routines, but as the environment became better known, they diverged from them despite the reduction in foraging efficiency. While foraging, PCC neurons tracked environmental information but not reward and predicted variability in the pattern of choices. Together, these findings suggest that PCC mediates the influence of information on variability in choice behavior.