01 were significantly earlier in OFC than amygdala; Wilcoxon, p < 0.01). Focusing on postlearning trials, we examined the contribution of image Trametinib value to each cell’s activity throughout the trial. Figure 8 illustrates that OFC neurons as a population are quicker to encode image value, regardless of their positive or negative CS value preference. Compared with amygdala, we found relatively more OFC neurons with the earliest significant

value contributions—less than 150 ms following cue onset (χ2 test, p < 0.05). Moreover, the average contribution-of-value signal reached significance for the OFC earlier than amygdala by about 40–60 ms for both positive and negative cells (Figures 8E and 8F; F-test, p < 0.01). We fit sigmoid curves to the early portion (first 500 ms after image onset) of the average contribution-of-value signal for each group; in both cases, the time to reach the scale-adjusted threshold for the OFC group was significantly

shorter than that for the amygdala group (F-test, p < 0.01). Thus, in contrast to the robust differences between 26s Proteasome structure positive and negative neurons in the timing of the value signal during learning, OFC neurons encoded image value more rapidly during the trial than amygdala neurons after learning. The postlearning timing differences in the single unit data suggest that OFC might preferentially influence signaling in amygdala after learning. We looked for evidence to support this notion by examining LFPs recorded simultaneously in OFC and amygdala. We recorded LFPs from 853 sites in two monkeys, yielding 1282 simultaneously recorded OFC-amygdala pairs. We estimated the directed influences between OFC and amygdala using Granger causality analysis, which measures (-)-p-Bromotetramisole Oxalate the degree to which the past values of one LFP predict the current values of another (see Experimental Procedures).

Looking at a broad range of frequencies (5–100 Hz), we computed Granger causality in sliding windows across the trial for all postreversal trials. We found that the average influence in both directions—OFC-to-amygdala and amygdala-to-OFC—was significantly elevated during the image presentation and trace intervals (Wilcoxon, p < 0.01; Figure 9A), indicative of a task-related increase in the exchange of information between these areas. Granger causality was generally significantly greater in the OFC-to-amygdala direction (Figure 9A, blue line) than in the amygdala-to-OFC direction (Figure 9A, green line) throughout much of the trial (asterisks; permutation test, p < 0.05). We also examined whether Granger causality changes as a function of learning. For each time window across the trial, we subtracted the Granger causality in the amygdala-to-OFC direction from the causality in the OFC-to-amygdala direction, yielding a measure of the relative strength of directed influence between the LFPs from each brain area.