New Publication - Lukas Oesch, PhD (Churchland Lab)

Anterior cingulate neurons combine outcome monitoring of past decisions with ongoing movement signals

Lukas T. Oesch, Makenna C. Thomas, Davis Sandberg, João Couto & Anne K. Churchland

Nature Communications volume 17, Article number: 4354 (2026) 

The ability to flexibly update our decision-making strategy is crucial to navigating the rich and dynamic environments we encounter every day. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is thought to play a crucial role in flexible decision-making by tracking the effects of our actions: if actions do not result in expected outcomes, the ACC triggers an update to the current decision-making rule. But what does the ACC do when everything happens as planned? Does it still keep its vigilant eye out? In our study, we investigated whether neurons in the ACC of mice track action-outcome combinations (trial history) in perceptual decision-making tasks where the rules never change. We found that both individual neurons and population activity in the ACC indeed monitored trial history over several seconds. These trial history signals were not simply explained by the mouse’s body posture or movements, and they were very similar between different subjects. Thus, our findings reveal that ACC neurons maintain an internal record of past decisions and outcomes even in highly predictable environments, suggesting that the ACC may have evolved to always expect the unexpected.