Executive control and decision-making in the prefrontal cortex

•Probabilistic reasoning accounts for executive control in the PFC.•Premotor and OFC regions subserve action selection in stable environments.•vmPFC & dmPFC infer when to switch away from exploitation behavior.•Polar PFC and lPFC infer when and how to switch out of exploration.•Polar PFC infers the reliability of a few alternative behavioral sets.

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) subserves decision-making and executive control. Here we review recent empirical and modeling works with a focus on neuroimaging studies, which start unifying these two conceptual approaches of PFC function. We propose that the PFC comprises two arbitration systems: (1) a peripheral system comprising premotor/caudal PFC regions and orbitofrontal regions involved in the selection of actions based on perceptual cues and reward values, respectively, and embedded in behavioral sets associated with external contingencies inferred as being stable; (2) a core system comprising ventromedial, dorsomedial, lateral and polar PFC regions involved in superordinate probabilistic reasoning for arbitrating online between exploiting/adjusting previously learned behavioral sets and exploring/creating new ones for efficient adaptive behavior in variable and open-ended environments.