Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we present a spiking neural model of contextdependent decision making. Prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays afundamental role in context dependent behaviour. We modelthe PFC at the level of single spiking neurons, to explore theunderlying computations which determine its contextual re-sponses. The model is built using the Neural EngineeringFramework and performs input selection and integration as anonlinear recurrent dynamical process. The results obtainedfrom the model closely match behavioural and neural experi-mental data obtained from macaque monkeys that are trainedto perform a context sensitive perceptual decision task. Theclose match suggests that the low-dimensional, nonlinear dy-namical model we suggest captures central aspects of contextdependent decision making in primates.