Responses to Task-Irrelevant Visual Features by Primate Prefrontal Neurons

Abstract

Responses to task-irrelevant visual features by primate prefrontal neurons. J Neurophysiol 86: 2001–2010, 2001. The primate brain is equipped with prefrontal circuits for interpreting visual information, but how these circuits deal with competing stimulus-response (S-R) associations remains unknown. Here we show different types of responses to task-irrelevant visual features in three functionally dis-sociated groups of primate prefrontal neurons. Two Japanese ma-caques participated in a go/no-go task in which they had to discrim-inate either the color or the motion direction of a visual target to make a correct manual response. Prior to the experiment, the monkeys had been trained extensively so that they acquired fixed associations between visual features and required responses (e.g., “green 5 go”; “downward motion 5 no-go”). In this design, the monkey was con-fronted with a visual target from which it had to extract relevant information (e.g., color in the color-discrimination condition) whil