20 May 2026
When faced with unfamiliar problems, humans and other animals must plan and execute action sequences that they might not have used before. In macaque monkeys, this ability is supported by a population of neurons in the brain’s frontal cortex that encode recombinable action units or ‘action symbols’.
This is a summary of: Tian, L. Y. et al. Neural representation of action symbols in primate frontal cortex. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10297-x (2026).
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