Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex acts as an integrative hub during information gathering

Abstract

Gathering information before committing to a choice is critical in real-world decision making, and biases thereof are hallmark features of psychiatric disorders. Here, we study the behavioural and neural mechanisms that guide information gathering and characterise several key cognitive constituents, including escalating urgency and systematically biased temporal weighting of information. Using fMRI, we identify an integrated information gathering signal in ventromedial and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices (dmPFC), signalling an overall likelihood for continued sampling of information. Teasing this signal apart, we find distinct neural circuits encoding separable information-gathering constituents: whilst an urgency signal primarily engaged locus coeruleus and dmPFC, accumulated evidence was represented in anterio-medial PFC, and evidence-strength prediction errors were computed in ventral striatum and dmPFC. These findings indicate that information gathering arises from functionally distinguishable prefrontal-subcortical computations that converge within medial prefrontal cortex, providing a mechanistic framework for understanding aberrant sampling in psychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.