## Functional Architecture of Executive Control and Associated Event-Related Potentials in the Macaque Monkey ### Background Effective control of behavior is necessary to override conflicting, habitual, or inappropriate responses, and to facilitate stopping, switching, and updating of task goals. Investigating features of executive control is afforded through the countermanding (stop-signal) task, during which macaque monkeys, like humans, exert response inhibition and adapt performance based on stimulus history, response outcomes, and the temporal structure of task events. A wealth of previous research has shown that the medial frontal cortex enables executive control by monitoring relevant information and using it to adapt behavior. However, whilst the presence of executive control signals are well documented in MFC, how they arise is uncertain. In this study, we address this by looking at the patterns of neural spiking with laminar resolution. To achieve this we recorded electrical potentials over and neural spiking across all layers of the supplementary eye field (SEF) using linear multicontact arrays whilst macaques performed a saccade countermanding (stop-signal) task. ### Summary of findings In our manuscript (Sajad*, Errington*, & Schall, 2022), we report the laminar organization of neurons enabling executive control by monitoring the conflict between incompatible responses, the timing of events, and sustaining goal maintenance. Briefly, we observed that these neurons were a mix of narrow and broad-spiking found in all layers, but those predicting the duration of control and sustaining the task goal until the release of operant control were more commonly narrow-spiking neurons confined to layers 2 and 3 (L2/3). These results are complemented with evidence for a monkey homologue of the N2/P3 event-related potential (ERP) complex associated with response inhibition. We found that N2 polarization varied with error likelihood and P3 polarization varied with the duration of expected control. Interestingly, the amplitude of the N2 and P3 were predicted by the spike rate of different classes of neurons located in L2/3 but not L5/6. We believe these findings reveal features of the cortical microcircuitry supporting executive control and producing associated ERP. ### About this repository In this repository, we provide code and data to reproduce the figures presented within this manuscript, and allow readers to further examine aspects of dataset we may not have considered.