Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex links abstract planning to motor execution

Abstract

Mental planning is essential for producing action sequences. Despite the contribution of planning to many everyday activities, the neurocognitive processes that map a selected plan into a concrete course of action are unclear. We asked whether planning and execution are linked by abstract task relationships that are divorced from the specifics of action implementation. Human participants underwent functional MRI while performing a task that required encoding and maintaining abstract representations in order to plan and later apply those representations to execute action sequences. Our analyses revealed that dorsomedial prefrontal cortex encoded representations during the planning period that shifted progressively from information based on perceptual input to information associated with the abstract task context. These abstract representations were then used to translate between the action plan and its execution irrespective of the perceptual and motor details, indicating that DMPFC builds and sustains an abstract representational bridge that links planning to action.