Abstract :
Decisions become challenging when options involve competing attributes, such as lower price but slower delivery or immediate availability at a premium. Yet how the brain transforms incommensurable attributes into a single choice remains unknown. Leveraging large-scale electrophysiology in mice performing a reward-versus-delay tradeoff, we found that ventral prefrontal cortex (vPFC) encoded task variables within high-dimensional subspaces organized by delay conditions, whose geometry predicted the weighting of delay in choice. In contrast, dorsal frontal areas organized population activity along a shared axis, whose projection magnitude tracked action value across delay. Silencing dorsal regions impaired choice regardless of delay, whereas inhibiting vPFC reduced the delay-dependent modulation of dorsal frontal activity and animals behaved as if delay no longer influenced choice. Frontal cortex thus operates through a generator-modulator architecture in which dorsal frontal circuits support decision formation, whereas ventral prefrontal circuits encode competing attributes in high-dimensional subspaces that modulate decisions when options conflict.