Neural Correlates of Decisions and Their Outcomes in the Ventral Premotor Cortex

Selection of the appropriate action in a changing environment involves a chain of events that goes from perception through decision to action and evaluation of the outcomes. What and where in the brain are the correlates of these events? The ventral premotor cortex (PMv) is a candidate because (1) it is involved in sensory transformations for visually guided actions and in perceptual decisions, and (2) it is connected with sensory, motor, and high-level cognitive areas related to performance monitoring. Therefore, we hypothesized that it would be the site for representing sensory perception for action and for evaluating the decision consequences. Trained monkeys were required to discriminate the orientation of two lines showed in sequence and separated by a delay. Monkeys compared the orientation of the second line with the memory trace of the first and communicated whether the second was to the left or to the right of the first. Here we show that the activity of PMv neurons reflected (1) the first stimuli and its memory trace during the delay and comparison periods, (2) its comparison with the second stimuli, including the strength of the evidence, and (3) the result of the discrimination (choice). After the monkeys reported the choice, there were neurons that only encoded the choices, others only the outcomes, and others the choices and outcomes together. The representation of task cues, decision variables, and their outcomes suggest a role of PMv as part of a supervisory network involved in shaping future behavior and in learning.

keywords: ventral premotor cortex, working memory, decision-making, errors, single neural activity, monkeys