Complex motor tasks often consist of multiple simple actions performed in a specific sequence.
Proper sequencing of simple actions has been suggested to depend on neurons that fire preferentially during specific steps in a sequence.
Candidate ordinal position neurons are present in several motor areas, including the supplementary eye fields (SEF).
According to Berddyeva and Olson, neurons in SEF respond not only during specific steps in a predefined, learned sequence of saccades (as has been shown previously), but also during the equivalent step in a sequence of saccades that were cued by a learned sequence of visual stimuli and could not be planned in advance.
Although many of these neurons also fired preferentially when a reward of a specific size was expected, and many neurons exhibited increased or decreased firing over the course of a trial, neither reward anticipation nor passage of time was sufficient to explain the differential firing during the sequence tasks.
By Society for Neuroscience
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