The rat frontal orienting field dynamically encodes value for economic decisions under risk

Frontal and parietal cortex are implicated in economic decision-making, but their causal roles are untested. Here we silenced the frontal orienting field (FOF) and posterior parietal cortex (PPC) while rats chose between a cued lottery and a small stable surebet. PPC inactivations produced minimal short-lived effects. FOF inactivations reliably reduced lottery choices. A mixed-agent model of choice indicated that silencing the FOF caused a change in the curvature of the rats' utility function (U = Vρ). Consistent with this finding, single-neuron and population analyses of neural activity confirmed that the FOF encodes the lottery value on each trial. A dynamical model, which accounts for electrophysiological and silencing results, suggests that the FOF represents the current lottery value to compare against the remembered surebet value. These results demonstrate that the FOF is a critical node in the neural circuit for the dynamic representation of action values for choice under risk

Not As Easy As You Think-Experiences and Lessons Learnt from Creating a Visualization Image Typology

We present and discuss the results of a two-year qualitative analysis of images published in IEEE Visualization (VIS) papers. Specifically, we derive a typology of 13 visualization image types, coded to distinguish visual designs and several image characteristics. The categorization process required much more time and was more difficult than we anticipated. The resulting typology and image analysis may serve a number of purposes: to study the evolution of the community and its research output over time, to facilitate the categorization of visualization images for the purpose of research or teaching, to identify visual design styles, or to enable progress towards standardization in visualization. In addition to the typology and image characterization, we provide a dataset of 6,833 tagged images and an online tool that can be used to explore and analyze the large set of tagged images. The tool and data set enable a close examination of the diverse visualizations used and how they are published and communicated in our community