Why does the monkey prefrontal cortex keep future goals and past goals in separate neural populations, and what does the frontal pole exclusively care about? Aldo Genovesio reveals how the primate brain organizes goal-directed behavior.

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Aldo Genovesio presents neurophysiological findings from single-cell recordings in the monkey prefrontal cortex that illuminate how the brain represents goals, strategies, and task monitoring. Using a strategy task where monkeys must remember previous goals to determine future actions, his laboratory discovered that prefrontal neurons encode conjunctions of abstract information: individual cells combine representations of strategy (repeat-stay or change-shift) with specific goals or stimulus features, revealing a rich combinatorial  ...