Premotor cortex hemodynamic responses primarily reflect perceptual rather than specific motor aspects of decision making

Decisions are driven by perception, but also by non-perceptual factors. It remains an open question, however, whether frontal brain regions involved in perceptual decision-making tend to uniquely reflect the perception of an animal, or the final choice of action driven by perceptual and non-perceptual factors. Using functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI), we investigated how the premotor cortex (PMC) in ferrets represents stimuli in a Go/NoGo auditory categorization task, varying the difficulty in order to manipulate the rates of perceptual errors relative to non-perceptual errors. We found that on Easy error trials, where error in perception was less likely, PMC activity was similar to correct answers for the same stimulus category. In contrast, on Difficult error trials, PMC activity more closely reflected the choice the animal made, being similar to correct answers for the opposite category. These results together are consistent with PMC activity reflecting the reward-predictive perceptual category. Perceptual errors could be refined further by assessing licking patterns, but licking patterns alone did not explain the effect. This study advances our understanding of the functional role of the frontal cortex in decision-making, suggesting that the PMC integrates sensory inputs to guide behavior based on perceptual information, rather than motivational information.