Neural Correlates of Biased Competition in Premotor Cortex
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been proposed that whenever an animal faces several action choices, their neural representations are processed in parallel in frontoparietal cortex and compete in a manner biased by any factor relevant to the decision. We tested this hypothesis by recording single-unit activity in dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) while a monkey performed two delayed center-out reaching tasks. In the one-target task, a single target was presented and its border style indicated its reward value. The two-target task was the same except two targets were presented and the value of each was varied. During the delay period of the one-target task, directionally tuned PMd activity showed no modulation with value. In contrast, during the two-target task, the same neurons showed strong effects of the value associated with their preferred target, always in relation to the value of the other target. Furthermore, the competition between action choices was strongest when targets were furthest apart. This angular distance effect appeared in neural activity as soon as cells became tuned, while modulation by relative value appeared much later. All of these findings can be reproduced by a computational model which suggests that decisions between actions are made through a biased competition taking place within a sensorimotor map of potential actions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".