Grant: Operating Grant

The world continually bombards us with sensory inputs that offer many opportunities for action. However, our behaviour is not slavishly driven by any and all sensory inputs. Instead, normal behaviour while interacting with our complex environment usually involves the selective and often very arbitrary response to only certain stimuli, usually during the focussed pursuit of a short or long-term goal, such as the sequences of arm and leg movements elicited by green, yellow and red lights while driving a car from home to the office. That simple example also illustrates how much of our voluntary behaviour is flexible, context-dependent, and acquired by personal experience. Failure to impose this rational introspective control on voluntary behaviour leads to many behavioural problems at both the level of the individual and society, including impulsive behaviour (e.g., distraction, inability to pursue a goal to its accomplishment), compulsive behaviour (e.g., gambling), perseverance (e.g., persistent use of inappropriate or counterproductive behaviour), and socially inappropriate behaviour (e.g., physical aggression, theft). The overall objective of this proposal is to gain further insight into the cerebral cortical single-neuron decision-making mechanisms underlying the selection of the appropriate action from among multiple competing alternatives, using as our experimental model visually-guided arm movements in non-human primates that have been trained to perform conditional motor tasks.