e., the recent history of a trial. We observed that both behavior and variability of the neuronal responses were modulated by trial history. Using a computational model, we show that these effects

can be explained in terms of a competitive process that is modulated by a monitoring signal. To quantify the biasing of the neuronal response due to the history of a trial, we calculated the mean FR and the across-trial spike variability during Go trials see more that were sorted by different history conditions. We observed a significant and systematic difference in RT and neural response variability that held over a wide range of trial history conditions. These results suggested that, other than perceptual signals, neurons in PMd are also influenced by an additional input related to the history of the trial, i.e., memory. To validate this hypothesis, we studied the response of a mean-field approximation of a spiking neural model (Wilson and Cowan, 1972) in a simulated countermanding task. We observed that an additional monitoring-related signal can directly account for the observed changes in the neural response variability and the behavioral performance. We analyzed the behavioral responses of the monkeys looking at their RT in Go trials and probability of failure to cancel a planned movement in Stop trials. Consistent

with previous work (Emeric et al., 2007; Pouget et al., 2011), we observed that the mean RT of the monkeys increases when the current Go trial was preceded Etomidate by a Stop trial (Figure 1B), in contrast to when it was selleck chemicals llc preceded by a Go trial. This confirms that performance is modulated by trial history. In addition, the SD of the RT was higher when a Go trial was preceded by a Stop trial than when preceded by a Go trial (see Figure S1 available online). Moreover, a longer RT was associated

with a lower probability of failure in the following trial (Figure 1C), i.e., successful cancellation was more likely in a Stop (t) trial that followed a sequence of Go (t − 1) and Stop (t − 2) as opposed to a sequence comprising two Go trials. To assess the neural correlate of the decision process, we analyzed the modulation of the mean FR of the neurons and their across-trial spike variability, as measured by the variance of conditional expectation (VarCE) (Churchland et al., 2011) during motor preparation. For this analysis we used only Go trials from the time of the presentation of the Go signal until arm movement onset. We sorted the data with respect to the type of trial that was preceding the current Go trial: a Go or a Stop trial. We observed that after the presentation of the Go signal, both the FR and the VarCE increased until they reached a peak value at about 150 ms before movement onset (Figures 2A and 2B).