Neuroscience · Cognitive Neuroscience
Carrion crows were trained to respond to visual cues with either a vocalization or a peck. Vocal responses were slower and more variable, and switching into them caused additional delays and occasional errors that were largely absent for pecking.
Planning an action without carrying it out can still leave a memory trace. In two experiments, people were more likely to mistakenly recognize configurations from an unchosen solution path than genuinely new configurations.
A computational model offers an explanation for how the brain plans sequences of actions without representing them only one step at a time. It reproduces several patterns seen in primate frontal cortex, including simultaneous activity for multiple plan elements and shared activity patterns during forward and backward tasks.
