Population geometries in frontal cortex coordinate value-based decisions

Abstract

Decisions often involve trade-offs between benefits and costs, such as a small payment now vs. a larger payment after a delay. Although decision variables are distributed across frontal cortex, how these regions transform competing attributes into a choice remains unclear. Combining large-scale electrophysiology with causal perturbations as mice chose between different reward amounts and delays, we found that population geometry of decision variables differed across regions, reflecting distinct computations. Dorsal frontal areas, including motor cortex, collapsed competing attributes onto a decision axis shared across reward-delay contexts, with projection amplitude predicting choice probability; silencing these areas impaired action selection regardless of delay. In contrast, ventral prefrontal cortex (vPFC) represented choice in higher-dimensional subspaces organized by reward delay, whose geometry predicted how strongly delay influenced choice. Notably, inhibiting vPFC preserved the dorsal decision representation but selectively removed its modulation by reward delay, causing animals to behave as if delay no longer influenced choice. vPFC inhibition had no effect when mice chose between reward amounts. Frontal cortex therefore solves multi-attribute decisions through a generator-modulator architecture: dorsal frontal circuits maintain a shared choice axis guiding decisions across contexts, whereas vPFC maintains competing attributes in distinct subspaces that modulate decisions when options conflict.