{"doi":"10.1101/2021.04.05.438491","title":"Dynamic task-belief is an integral part of decision-making","abstract":"Summary Natural decisions involve two seemingly separable processes: inferring the relevant task (task-belief) and performing the believed-relevant task. The assumed separability has led to the traditional practice of studying task-switching and perceptual decision-making individually. Here, we used a novel paradigm to manipulate and measure macaque monkeys’ task-belief, and demonstrated inextricable neuronal links between flexible task-belief and perceptual decision-making. We showed that in animals, but not artificial networks that performed as well or better than the animals, stronger task-belief is associated with better perception. Correspondingly, recordings from neuronal populations in cortical areas 7a and V1 revealed that stronger task-belief is associated with better discriminability of the believed-relevant but not the believed-irrelevant feature. Perception also impacts belief updating: noise fluctuations in V1 help explain how task-belief is updated. Our results demonstrate that complex tasks and multi-area recordings can reveal fundamentally new principles of how biology affects behavior in health and disease.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2021,"id":215843,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":5,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9488,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":298274,"name":"Lily E. Kramer","orcid":"0000-0001-7312-8521","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":395662,"name":"Marlene R. Cohen","orcid":"0000-0001-8583-4300","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":395660,"name":"Cheng Xue","orcid":"0000-0001-5991-0111","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":54,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:53:00.192353Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}