Premotor cortex articles from across Nature Portfolio

How does motor-cortex activity well before movement not drive motor outputs? In this Review, Churchland and Shenoy detail how searching for answers transitioned the understanding of neural activity during movement from single-neuron tuning towards population-level factors and revealed an essential computational role of output-null factors.

Multiple cortical and subcortical brain regions are implicated in decision-making, yet their causal interactions remain unclear. Here, the authors identified cellular and circuit interactions that bias cortical decision-making dynamics and behavior.

In nonhuman primates, the role of frontal cortex in vocal production is unclear. Using wireless recording techniques in marmosets in a naturalistic social context, here the authors show that frontal cortex neural signals show distinct patterns for different call types.

It remains unclear why some decisions take longer than others even when the sensory inputs are similar. Here, the authors show that both initial neural state and sensory input combine in the premotor cortex to influence the speed and geometry of neural population activity during decisions.

Conservation of the neural code across subjects is crucial for training brain-computer interfaces. Through alignment of neural manifolds, the authors show cross-subject generalization in the decoding of unconstrained behavior from sensorimotor cortex.

Thalamic activity onto a sparse population of premotor neurons in the zebra finch song nucleus initiates syllable onset, enabling the orchestration of song production.

A study reports that low-amplitude intracortical microstimulation in the premotor cortex can be used to induce movements in monkeys by learned association.

A study finds that, during movement preparation, when motor cortex is active, but elicits no muscle output, firing of individual neurons in dorsal premotor and primary motor cortex cancels out at the level of population activity.

The dorsal premotor cortex encodes both target direction and movement direction during a complex reaching task.