Dynamic Information Processing in the Frontal Association Areas of Monkeys During Hypothesis Testing Behavior

Top-down visual search is based on subjective knowledge about the target, which is updated with behavioral consequences. To establish whether the frontal association areas (FAAs) are involved in the knowledge-based visual search, we introduced a new oculomotor task requiring monkeys to search for a valid pair of targets among four visual stimuli where the valid pair of targets changed without instruction. This result indicated that the FAA neurons of the monkeys showed a gradual shift of representation when the valid pair was changed. Our result suggests that the FAAs are involved in dynamically updating subjective knowledge of the search for targets based on behavioral consequences.