Prefrontal Neurons Predict Choices during an Auditory Same-Different Task

SummaryThe detection of stimuli is critical for an animal's survival [1]. However, it is not adaptive for an animal to respond automatically to every stimulus that is present in the environment 2, 3, 4 and 5. Given that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a key role in executive function 6, 7 and 8, we hypothesized that PFC activity should be involved in context-dependent responses to uncommon stimuli. As a test of this hypothesis, monkeys participated in a same-different task, a variant of an oddball task [2]. During this task, a monkey heard multiple presentations of a “reference” stimulus that were followed by a “test” stimulus and reported whether these stimuli were the same or different. While they participated in this task, we recorded from neurons in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vPFC; a cortical area involved in aspects of nonspatial auditory processing 9 and 10). We found that vPFC activity was correlated with the monkeys' choices. This finding demonstrates a direct link between single neurons and behavioral choices in the PFC on a nonspatial auditory task.