While receptive fields (RFs) in ventral and dorsal visual areas are well characterized, their organization in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC), a region involved in visual processing and cognition, remains largely unexplored. We examined the RFs of 132 vlPFC neurons in macaque monkeys to characterize their spatial response properties, using extracellular recordings with a high-resolution, unbiased random-dot paradigm during passive viewing. Analysis revealed substantial heterogeneity in RF structure, allowing neurons to be classified into three types: uniform, full-field, and nonuniform.
More than 85% of neurons exhibited large RFs with multiple high-response regions spanning broad portions of peripheral visual space. These findings reveal the complex organization of vlPFC neurons and provide a foundation for understanding how this region supports flexible visual processing and cognitive computations. School of Cognitive Sciences, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences, Tehran, 19395-5746, Iran Department of Cognitive Sciences, Faculty of Psychology and Education, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, 14395-515, Iran State Key Laboratory of Brain Cognition and Brain-inspired Intelligence Technology, Institute of Neuroscience, Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200031, China Correspondence to Jalaledin Noroozi or Mohammad-Reza A.
The authors declare no competing interests. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Abolfathi, Y., Noroozi, J., Rezayat, E. et al. Receptive field organization in macaque vlPFC neurons. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-72301-8 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-72301-8
Extract — continue reading at the source.
