Naturalistic behavior and self-generated neural activity predictive of self-correction

Changing one’s mind –– revising a past decision independently of external cues –– can lead to better outcomes, but its neural basis remains poorly understood. We therefore developed a challenging spatial task for rats where a conflict between innate foraging biases and task rules leads to abundant, spontaneous, and characteristically corrective changes-of-mind (COMs). Neural recordings in the hippocampus, a brain region implicated in counterfactual thinking, revealed two distinct stages wherein more local representations gave way to representations of distant alternatives after animals had begun to reverse course. These representations predicted their eventual choice, and often serially encoded trial start and end locations. Our novel task paradigm reveals distinct representational phases engaged during self-correction and uncovers a rich repertoire of hippocampal spatial representations tied to behavior.