Information normally considered task-irrelevant drives decision-making and affects premotor circuit recruitment

Prior experience is used by the brain to guide adaptive behaviour during decision making. Here, the authors show that mice also selectively use information learned through recent and longer-term experience beyond just prior actions and reward to guide adaptive behaviour. Decision-making is a continuous and dynamic process with prior experience reflected in and used by the brain to guide adaptive behavior. However, most neurobiological studies constrain behavior and/or analyses to task-related variables, not accounting for the continuous internal and temporal space in which they occur. We show mice rely on information learned through recent and longer-term experience beyond just prior actions and reward - including checking behavior and the passage of time - to guide self-initiated, self-paced, and self-generated actions. These experiences are represented in secondary motor cortex (M2) activity and its projections into dorsal medial striatum (DMS). M2 integrates this information to bias strategy-level decision-making, and DMS projections reflect specific aspects of this recent experience to guide actions. This suggests diverse aspects of experience drive decision-making and its neural representation, and shows premotor corticostriatal circuits are crucial for using selective aspects of experiential information to guide adaptive behavior.

Automated summary

Prior experience plays a crucial role in guiding adaptive behavior during decision making. This study demonstrates that mice not only use information from prior actions and rewards, but also selectively incorporate information from recent and longer-term experiences, including checking behavior and the passage of time, to guide self-initiated actions. These experiences are represented in the secondary motor cortex and its projections into the dorsal medial striatum, which influence strategy-level decision-making.