Animals engage in routine behavior in order to efficiently navigate their environments. This routine behavior may be influenced by the state of the environment, such as the location and size of rewards. The neural circuits tracking environmental information and how that information impacts decisions to deviate from routines remains unexplored. To investigate the representation of environmental information during routine foraging, we recorded the activity of single neurons in posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) in two male monkeys searching through an array of targets in which the location of rewards was unknown. Outside the laboratory, people and animals solve such traveling salesman problems by following routine traplines that connect nearest-neighbor locations. In our task, monkeys also deployed traplining routines, but as the environment became better known, they deviate from them despite the reduction in foraging efficiency. While foraging, PCC neurons tracked environmental information but not reward and ...