J Tanji

..The differential use of these three areas for various motor behaviors has been the subject of recent studies that are beginning to provide novel concepts of the functional differentiation of each area...

..These findings point to the functional specialization of the two areas, with respect to receiving associative cues, information processing, motor behavior planning, and movement execution...

..These results further elucidate the functional specialization of the PMd and PMv during the processing of visual information for action planning...

..The prefrontal cortex also regulates the flow of information through multiple nodes to meet behavioral demands...

..Each type of cell seems to be involved in responding to the quality of the reward, and to relay that information to change planned movements, and prepare a new movement...

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..Subsequent lesions of the primary motor cortex gave rise to the appearance of premovement activity changes, indicating usedependent reorganization of the neuronal activity in SMA...

..The results indicate that these fields function as a part of the neural network involved in the learning of sequential saccadic eye movements...

..The animals then developed a strategy of solving the problem by planning a novel shortest path from the start to the goal and rerouting the path to bypass the obstacle...

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..Such neuronal activity, resembling the operation of binary counting elements widely used for constructing artificial computing devices, was rare in the supplementary motor area or in the primary motor cortex...

..Cells projecting to the SEF, but not to the pre-SMA, were observed in areas 8a, 8b, 9, 12, and 45. These findings suggest that the SEF and pre-SMA receive different sets of information from the PF cells...

..This finding implicates the prefrontal cortex in governing goal-oriented sequential behavior rather than sensorimotor transformation...

..On the other hand, CMAr activity during motor planning may reflect the emergence of a general intention for action...

..Our data suggest that the PFC is involved primarily in planning multiple future events that occur as a consequence of behavioral actions...

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..New lines of evidence also implicate the lateral premotor areas in planning motor behavior and selecting actions...

..By extracting this type of information, we can use it to control prosthetic arms in a more intelligent manner through a brain-machine interface...

..Recent studies show that the LPFC is involved in more abstract aspects of conceptual processes, such as in representing categories of multiple actions at the stage of behavioral planning...

..Recent studies have begun to reveal neuronal mechanisms for strategic behavioral planning and for the development of knowledge that enables the planning of macrostructures of event-action sequences at the conceptual level...

..We hypothesize that the transient increase in discharge synchrony is an indication of a process that facilitates dynamic changes in the prefrontal neural circuits in order to undergo profound state changes...

..Here, we show that activity of individual PMd neurons initially reflects a virtual action plan transcending motor specifics, before these neurons contribute to a transformation process that leads to activity encoding a motor plan...

..Cells projecting to the FEF and MI scarcely overlapped, indicating that each area receives different sets of information from the cingulate cortex...

..These findings point to preference in the use of neuronal activity in the two areas: preparation for action in the PMd and preparation for target acquisition in the PMv...

..This rank-order selectivity was found in parallel with the selectivity for the sequence of three saccades. Our data suggest a role for SEF neurons in the coding of temporally ordered saccadic eye movements...

..Our findings show that PFC cells are involved in holding temporal order information when that information is necessary for planning forthcoming motor behavior...

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..Our findings suggest that LPFC cells are involved in encoding temporal sequences of events when such information is required for planning forthcoming motor behavior...

..This suggests that neurons in each area can be classified into different groups possessing unique spiking statistics and corresponding functional properties...

..These findings suggest that each of the three sectors of the premotor cortex receive different sets of information from the prefrontal cortex...

..Subsequent analysis revealed that the laterality of arm representation differed in the three areas: it was predominantly contralateral in the SMA but largely bilateral in the pre-SMA and SEF...

..Thus sensorimotor transformations in the dorsolateral PFC appear to be time-variant and region-selective...

..Such activity in the superior parietal lobule is useful for processing numerical information, which is necessary to provide a foundation for the forthcoming motor selection...

..By measuring the Hellinger distances among those distributions, Pre-SMA, SMA and CMAr are found to be mutually similar in comparison with PF...

..These data suggest that while MI primarily receives inputs originating from Cb and SMA primarily receives inputs originating from GPi, it also appears that MI and SMA receive secondary afferents arising from GPi and Cb, respectively...

..We propose that the SEF is primarily involved in the process of planning, decoding, and updating saccade sequences, whereas the FEF plays a major role in determining the direction of forthcoming saccades...

..This head fixation system is suitable for behavioral experiments and single-unit recording studies. It may also be applicable for studies on functional imaging of the macaque brain, by constructing it of non-magnetic materials...

..These findings suggest that PMv neurons play a crucial role in determining which part of the body moves in which direction, at least under conditions in which a visual image of a limb is used to guide limb movements...

..In contrast, neurons in the PMd are involved more in integrating information about which arm to use and the target to be reached. Thus, PMd neurons are more implicated than those of the PMv in the preparation for a future motor action...

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