Behavioral expression of decision confidence engages disentangled confidence coding in the orbitofrontal cortex

Abstract

Task engagement is thought to recruit subsets of neurons encoding task-relevant variables, but it remains unclear whether it also reorganizes the geometry of population codes and how such reorganization supports behavior. Here we show that, in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), task engagement aligns population activity along a confidence axis, thereby enabling the behavioral use of decision confidence. We recorded OFC activity while rats performed two variants of the same perceptual decision-making task that differed only in reward-timing uncertainty, which altered the utility of post-decision confidence for guiding reward waiting. OFC neurons exhibited more linear responses to confidence when confidence was more strongly expressed in behavior. Although the proportion of OFC neurons encoding confidence was similar across strategies, strategy-dependent alignment of population activity to confidence emerged under variable long delays, and this alignment predicted confidence-based waiting behavior. These findings suggest that OFC population codes flexibly adapt to the behavioral relevance of task variables, linking cognitive strategy to the geometry of neural representation.