A series of connectional studies (Gerbella et al., 2017) suggested that the monkey ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPF) has a modular organization, with a posterior sector involved in the control of the oculomotor behavior, an intermediate sector involved in the control of skeletomotor behavior, and an anterior part mainly playing a role in encoding abstract aspects of behavior. Rozzi and coworkers (Rozzi et al., 2021, 2023) recently studied VLPF by using a Visual and a Visuomotor (Go/NoGo) task. These studies investigated how behavioral rules and different phases of the behavioral tasks are encoded, but they did not analyze the differential representation of the various functional aspects in the distinct sectors constituting VLPF. To address this issue, in the present work we re-analyzed the populations of recorded neurons based on an architectonical and connectional parcellation of VLPF, by employing Demixed Principal Component (dPCA) and decoding analyses. Our data show the existence of a caudo-rostral and a dorso-ventral gradient strongly consistent with the connectional properties of VLPF. In particular, moving from caudal to intermediate areas there is a progressive increase in encoding the preparation and production of behavioral responses, while moving from dorsal to ventral areas there is a progressive increase in the encoding of visual information, regardless of whether they are needed to guide behavior.
