Prefrontal cortex and behavior: Encoding of self-movement in dorsal prefrontal neurons

The prefrontal cortex is a heterogeneous structure consisting of several distinct areas, each with its own function. We examined a single unit activity of the dorsal prefrontal cortex during the performance of a delayed conditional discrimination task in which animals were required to discriminate between push-3 and push-12 and had to move the stick left or right depending on whether they pushed 3 or 12 times before the delay period. Many neurons in the dorsal prefrontal area showed activity changes related to the encoding of self-movement information. These findings indicate that the dorsal prefrontal area participates in the processing of self-movement information.