Dorsomedial prefrontal cortex links abstract planning to motor execution (opens in new tab)

Mental planning is essential for producing action sequences. Despite the contribution of planning to many everyday activities, the neurocognitive processes that map a selected plan into a concrete course of action are unclear. We asked whether planning and execution are linked by abstract task relationships that are independent of the specific perceptual and motor details of action implementation. Human participants underwent functional MRI while performing a task that required encoding and m...