Sensorimotor remapping drives task specialization in prefrontal cortex

Abstract The prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a key role in flexible, context-dependent decision-making. Yet, the population-level mechanisms that support this flexibility remain unclear: is there a generalist neural population involved in representing useful information across tasks, or are representations distributed over multiple modules of task-specialized subpopulations? Here, we investigate whether the population structure modularity in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) increases with sensorimotor remapping between task rules in two different paradigms. In a paradigm where all stimuli were remapped, we found a highly modular structure with two task-specialized subpopulations and one generalist. In a different paradigm where only half of the stimuli were remapped, modularity decreased but remained significant. Based on predictions drawn from a recurrent neural network fitted to experimental data, we propose that a gain modulation by global inhibition of mPFC can explain how task-specialized neurons emerge to varying degrees in each paradigm.