Persistent neuronal activity in human prefrontal cortex links perception and action

How do humans flexibly respond to changing environmental demands on a subsecond temporal scale? Extensive research has highlighted the key role of the prefrontal cortex in flexible decision-making and adaptive behaviour, yet the core mechanisms that translate sensory information into behaviour remai...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature human behaviour 2018-01, Vol.2 (1), p.80-91
Main Authors: Haller, Matar, Case, John, Crone, Nathan E., Chang, Edward F., King-Stephens, David, Laxer, Kenneth D., Weber, Peter B., Parvizi, Josef, Knight, Robert T., Shestyuk, Avgusta Y.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/378/2649
631/378/2649/1409
Adaptive behavior
Behavioral Sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Brain
Cognitive tasks
Cortex
Decision making
Experimental Psychology
Life Sciences
Microeconomics
Neurosciences
Personality and Social Psychology
Stimulus
Task performance
Transformation
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Summary:How do humans flexibly respond to changing environmental demands on a subsecond temporal scale? Extensive research has highlighted the key role of the prefrontal cortex in flexible decision-making and adaptive behaviour, yet the core mechanisms that translate sensory information into behaviour remain undefined. Using direct human cortical recordings, we investigated the temporal and spatial evolution of neuronal activity (indexed by the broadband gamma signal) in 16 participants while they performed a broad range of self-paced cognitive tasks. Here we describe a robust domain- and modality-independent pattern of persistent stimulus-to-response neural activation that encodes stimulus features and predicts motor output on a trial-by-trial basis with near-perfect accuracy. Observed across a distributed network of brain areas, this persistent neural activation is centred in the prefrontal cortex and is required for successful response implementation, providing a functional substrate for domain-general transformation of perception into action, critical for flexible behaviour. Intracranial recordings from epileptic patients during a number of different behavioural tasks reveal, in impressive spatiotemporal detail, that the human brain links perception and action through persistent neural activity in the prefrontal cortex and functionally linked brain regions.
ISSN:2397-3374
2397-3374
DOI:10.1038/s41562-017-0267-2