Prefrontal cortex encodes behavior states decoupled from movement

Prefrontal cortex is often viewed as an extension of the motor system, but little is understood of how it relates to natural motor behavior. We therefore tracked the kinematics of freely moving rats performing minimally structured tasks and measured which aspects of behavior were read out in prefrontal neural populations. Naturalistic behaviors such as rearing or chasing a bait were each encoded by unique neural ensembles, but the behavioral representations were not anchored to posture or movement. Rather, the coding of kinematic features depended on their relevance to the animals current behavior or which task the animal performed. Behavior-specific ensembles often preceded and outlasted physical actions and, accordingly, prefrontal population activity evolved at slower timescales than in motor cortex. These findings argue that prefrontal coding of behavior is not locked to motor output, and may instead reflect motivations to perform certain actions rather than the actions themselves. HighlightsO_LIPrefrontal neural ensembles uniquely encode different naturalistic actions C_LIO_LIBehavioral tuning is not explained by movement kinematics C_LIO_LIPopulation activity in prefrontal cortex evolves slower than in M1 C_LIO_LISingle-cell coding of behavior varies across tasks yet ensemble coding is stable C_LI