Intention, Action Planning, and Decision Making in Parietal-Frontal Circuits

The posterior parietal cortex and frontal cortical areas to which it connects are responsible for sensorimotor transformations. This review covers new research on four components of this transformation process: planning, decision making, forward state estimation, and relative-coordinate representations. These sensorimotor functions can be harnessed for neural prosthetic operations by decoding intended goals (planning) and trajectories (forward state estimation) of movements as well as higher cortical functions related to decision making and potentially the coordination of multiple body parts (relative-coordinate representations).