Electrophysiological recordings of prefrontal activity over learning in non-human primates

The relationship between the geometry of neural representations and the task being performed is a central question in neuroscience. The primate prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a primary focus of inquiry in this regard, as under different conditions, PFC can encode information with geometries that either rely on past experience or are experience agnostic. One hypothesis is that PFC representations should evolve with learning, from a format that supports exploration of all possible task rules to a format that minimises metabolic cost and supports generalisation. Here we test this idea by recording neural activity from PFC when learning a new rule (‘XOR rule’) from scratch. We show that PFC representations progress from being high dimensional and randomly mixed to low dimensional and rule selective, consistent with predictions from metabolically constrained optimised neural networks. We also find that this low-dimensional representation facilitates generalisation of the XOR rule to a new stimul..., , , # Electrophysiological recordings of prefrontal activity during learning in non-human primates

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.c2fqz61kb](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.c2fqz61kb)

## Experiment Description

The dataset was collected in experiments where monkeys performed a passive object-association task designed to study learning dynamics. All details can be found in the methods section of the manuscript ([https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.24.538054v1](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.24.538054v1)).

#### Experiment 1

In the first experiment, the monkeys were presented with visual stimuli consisting of a colour and a shape. The reward was determined by a nonlinear combination (XOR) of these features. Neural recordings were collected from the very first session to capture the learning process as it unfolded.

#### Experiment 2

In the second experiment, an additional pair of colours was introduced to assess whether the rule learned in the first experiment ...,