A role for the ventral premotor cortex beyond performance monitoring
AUTOR(ES)
Pardo-Vazquez, Jose L.
FONTE
National Academy of Sciences
RESUMO
Depending on the circumstances, decision making requires either comparing current sensory information with that showed recently or with that recovered from long-term memory (LTM). In both cases, to learn from past decisions and adapt future ones, memories and outcomes have to be available after the report of a decision. The ventral premotor cortex (PMv) is a good candidate for integrating memory traces and outcomes because it is involved in working-memory, decision-making, and encoding the outcomes. To test this hypothesis we recorded the extracellular unit activity while monkeys performed 2 variants of a visual discrimination task. In one task, the decision was based on the comparison of the orientation of a current stimulus with that of another stimulus recently shown. In the other task, the monkeys had to compare the current orientation of the stimulus with the correct one retrieved from LTM. Here, we report that when the task required retrieval of the stimulus and its use in the following trials, the neurons continue encoding this internal representation together with the outcomes after the monkey has emitted the motor response. However, this codification did not occur when the stimulus was shown recently and updated every trial. These results suggest that the PMv activity represents the information needed to evaluate the consequences of a decision. We interpret these results as evidence that the PMv plays a role in evaluating the outcomes that can serve to learn and thus adapt future decision to environmental demands.
ACESSO AO ARTIGO
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2774019Documentos Relacionados
- An oculomotor representation area within the ventral premotor cortex
- The role of ipsilateral premotor cortex in hand movement after stroke
- The Differential Role of Premotor Frontal Cortex and Basal Ganglia in Motor Sequence Learning: Evidence From Focal Basal Ganglia Lesions
- Beyond sensory images: Object-based representation in the human ventral pathway
- Signaling of Grasp Dimension and Grasp Force in Dorsal Premotor Cortex and Primary Motor Cortex Neurons During Reach to Grasp in the Monkey