Decision-making consists of selecting an action from a set of available options, which may result in an outcome that has to be evaluated to adapt the choices to the environmental demands. The ventral premotor cortex is involved in sensory transformations for visually guided actions and in perceptual decisions, and it is connected with sensory, motor and high level cognitive areas related to performance monitoring. Therefore, the ventral premotor cortex is well situated to process information that links sensory information to decision, action and evaluation.

In our experiments, we simultaneously record the single neural activity and the behavioral performance of the monkeys to correlate the neural signals with behavior. The steps needed to reveal the neural correlates of the decision process are: to establish a formal framework on which the decision is based; design an appropriate behavioral task and asses it; to obtain the data and reveal the correlates of the behavioral process.

The neurons of the ventral premotor cortex codified the sensory evidence and their memory traces; the comparison between the traces and the sensory evidence; the strength of the sensory evidence, the choices and their outcomes. This suggests a role of the ventral premotor cortex in supervision of the behavior and in learning.