Macaque dorsal premotor cortex exhibits decision-related activity only when specific stimulus-response associations are known
Date
2019-02-27
Authors
Wang, Megan
Montanede, Christeva
Chandrasekaran, Chandramouli
Peixoto, Diogo
Shenoy, Krishna V.
Kalaska, John F.
Version
Published version
OA Version
Citation
Megan Wang, Christeva Montanede, Chandramouli Chandrasekaran, Diogo Peixoto, Krishna V Shenoy, John F Kalaska. 2019. "Macaque dorsal premotor cortex exhibits decision-related activity only when specific stimulus-response associations are known." Nature Communications, Volume 10, 1793. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09460-y
Abstract
How deliberation on sensory cues and action selection interact in decision-related brain areas is still not well understood. Here, monkeys reached to one of two targets, whose colors alternated randomly between trials, by discriminating the dominant color of a checkerboard cue composed of different numbers of squares of the two target colors in different trials. In a Targets First task the colored targets appeared first, followed by the checkerboard; in a Checkerboard First task, this order was reversed. After both cues appeared in both tasks, responses of dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) units covaried with action choices, strength of evidence for action choices, and RTs— hallmarks of decision-related activity. However, very few units were modulated by checkerboard color composition or the color of the chosen target, even during the checkerboard deliberation epoch of the Checkerboard First task. These findings implicate PMd in the action-selection but not the perceptual components of the decision-making process in these tasks.
Description
License
© The Author(s) 2019. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.