Premotor cortex hemodynamic responses primarily reflect perceptual rather than specific motor aspects of decision making.

Overview

1. Laboratoire des systèmes perceptifs, Département d’études cognitives, École Normale Supérieure, PSL University, CNRS, Paris, France
2. Ear Institute, University College London, London, United Kingdom
3. Neural Systems Laboratory, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States of America

Abstract

Decisions are driven by perception, but also by non-perceptual factors. It remains an open question, however, whether frontal brain regions involved in perceptual decision-making tend to uniquely reflect the perception of an animal, or the final choice of action driven by perceptual and non-perceptual factors. Using functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI), we investigated how the premotor cortex (PMC) in ferrets represents stimuli in a Go/NoGo auditory categorization task, varying the difficulty in order to manipulate the rates of perceptual errors relative to non-perceptual errors. We found that on Easy error trials, where error in perception was less likely, PMC activity was similar to correct answers for the same stimulus category. In contrast, on Difficult error trials, PMC activity more closely reflected the choice the animal made, being similar to correct answers for the opposite category. These results together are consistent with PMC activity reflecting the reward-predictive perceptual category. Perceptual errors could be refined further by assessing licking patterns, but licking patterns alone did not explain the effect. This study advances our understanding of the functional role of the frontal cortex in decision-making, suggesting that the PMC integrates sensory inputs to guide behavior based on perceptual information, rather than motivational information.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Data

Datasets cited

• zenodo:19354970, at Zenodo; found in the text, “2.3 PMC activity reflects internal rather than…”

Data Availability

Column-formatted data used for all major analyses is located at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19354970, via Zenodo. Also included are motion energy data and piezo data, as well as the full codebase used for the project and the specific data underlying figures 2B, 2C, 2D, 2E, 3C, 3D, 3E, 4B, 4D, 4E, 4F, 4G, and 4H. Raw imaging data and video data is too large to be uploaded but will be stored on the lab’s NAS at Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs, and will be made available on request.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

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Version 1, 28 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 3 authors, 10 MeSH terms, 4 funders, 36 references, 1 integrity notice.

Cite

This paper

Boucher, J., Shamma, S., & Boubenec, Y. (2026). Premotor cortex hemodynamic responses primarily reflect perceptual rather than specific motor aspects of decision making. PLoS biology, 24(5), e3003768. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003768

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