A frontal motor circuit for economic decisions and actions

Abstract

Flexible behaviour requires transforming abstract cognitive representations, such as value preferences, into concrete motor actions. During economic decision-making, individuals evaluate options to guide choices and then transform these choices into specific actions to obtain rewards. Understanding how neural circuits convert these abstract economic decisions into spatial actions remains challenging because decision formation and motor planning are typically intertwined. Here we introduce a mouse task that temporally dissociates value-guided decisions from spatial action planning, and show that a frontal motor network implements the transformation across decision stages through dynamic circuit reconfiguration. Using cortex-wide imaging and optogenetic perturbations, we identified a frontal motor circuit that was causally required for both abstract and motor stages of choice. During the abstract decision stage, neurons in this circuit encoded option values and economic choices independently of sensorimotor contingencies, and unilateral silencing impaired decisions without spatial bias. In contrast, during spatial planning, value and spatial signals were non-linearly integrated to guide action selection, and unilateral silencing produced an ipsilateral bias. A dynamical model captured this transformation, predicting a mode switch from cooperative interhemispheric maintenance of economic choice to competitive, lateralized control of actions, which we validated with simultaneous bilateral recordings. These findings demonstrate how frontal motor circuits reconfigure their interactions to bridge abstract cognition and concrete actions, providing a circuit-level mechanism for flexible, value-guided behaviour.