It's not just walking and chewing gum- our brains have to multitask all the time in order to integrate complex sensory input and make decisions. A new study in Nature reveals that this may not happen the way researchers thought it did. Neuroscientists at Stanford University used data gathered from eye-tracking experiments with macaques to develop a computer model to simulate how the monkeys' neurons were involved in decision-making. The monkeys were required to look at moving red and green dots on a screen and determine if there were more red dots or in which direction the dots were moving. When the researchers fed this data into a recurrent neural network, they found that the entire group of neurons they were studying received information about both color and motion. When the monkeys were asked about the color of the dots, their prefrontal cortex neurons ignored information about motion, and vice versa. The neurons, then, were able to multitask and selectively pay attention to different aspects of the environment depending on what was most relevant.

Read more: http://stanford.io/1iOTNxp
Journal article: Context-dependent computation by recurrent dynamics in prefrontal cortex. Nature, 2013. doi:10.1038/nature12742
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