The ventral frontal cortex (VFC) in macaques is involved in many affective and cognitive processes and has a key role in flexibly guiding reward-based decision-making. VFC is composed of a set of anatomically distinct subdivisions that are within the orbitofrontal cortex, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and anterior insula. In part, because prior studies have lacked the resolution to test for differences, it is unclear if neural representations related to decision-making are dissociable across these subdivisions. Here we recorded the activity of thousands of neurons within eight anatomically defined subdivisions of VFC in male macaque monkeys performing a two-choice probabilistic task for different fruit juice outcomes. We found substantial variation in the encoding of decision variables across these eight subdivisions. Notably, ventrolateral Area 12l was unique relative to the other areas that we recorded from as the activity of single neurons integrated multiple attributes when monkeys evaluated the different choice options. Activity within Area 12o, in contrast, more closely represented reward probability and whether reward was received on a given trial. Orbitofrontal Area 11m/l contained more specific representations of the quality of the outcome that could be earned later on. We also found that reward delivery encoding was highly distributed across all VFC subdivisions, while the properties of the reward, such as its flavor, were more strongly represented in Areas 11m/l and 13m. Taken together, our work reveals the diversity of encoding within the various anatomically distinct subdivisions of VFC in primates.

猕猴的腹侧额叶皮层（VFC）参与许多情感和认知过程，在灵活指导基于奖励的决策中发挥着关键作用。 VFC 由一组解剖学上不同的细分组成，这些细分位于眶额皮质、腹外侧前额叶皮质和前岛叶内。在某种程度上，由于先前的研究缺乏测试差异的分辨率，因此尚不清楚与决策相关的神经表征是否在这些细分中是可分离的。在这里，我们记录了雄性猕猴的 VFC 八个解剖学定义的细分内数千个神经元的活动，这些雄性猕猴对不同的果汁结果执行两项选择的概率任务。我们发现这八个细分领域的决策变量编码存在很大差异。值得注意的是，腹外侧区域 12l 相对于我们记录的其他区域是独特的，因为当猴子评估不同的选择选项时，单个神经元的活动整合了多个属性。相比之下，12o 区域内的活动更接近地代表奖励概率以及在给定试验中是否收到奖励。眶额面积 11m/l 包含更具体的结果质量表示，可以稍后获得。我们还发现奖励传递编码在所有 VFC 细分中高度分布，而奖励的属性（例如其味道）在 11m/l 和 13m 区域中表现得更强烈。总而言之，我们的工作揭示了灵长类动物 VFC 的各种解剖学上不同的细分中编码的多样性。