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Exploring the neural mechanisms of awareness is a fundamental task of cognitive neuroscience. There is an ongoing dispute regarding the role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in the emergence of awareness, which is partially raised by the confound between report- and awareness-related activity. To address this problem, we designed a visual awareness task that can minimize report-related motor confounding. Our results show that saccadic latency is significantly shorter in the aware trials than in the unaware trials. Local field potential (LFP) data from six patients consistently show early (200–300ms) awareness-related activity in the PFC, including event-related potential and high-gamma activity. Moreover, the awareness state can be reliably decoded by the neural activity in the PFC since the early stage, and the neural pattern is dynamically changed rather than being stable during the representation of awareness. Furthermore, the enhancement of dynamic functional connectivity, through the phase modulation at low frequency, between the PFC and other brain regions in the early stage of the awareness trials may explain the mechanism of conscious access. These results indicate that the PFC is critically involved in the emergence of awareness.

Motor control, motor learning, self-recognition, and spatial perception all critically depend on the comparison of motor intention to the actually executed movement. Despite our knowledge that the brainstem-cerebellum plays an important role in motor error detection and motor learning, the involvement of neocortex remains largely unclear. Here, we report the neuronal computation and representation of saccadic error in macaque posterior parietal cortex (PPC). Neurons with persistent pre- and post-saccadic response (PPS) represent the intended end-position of saccade; neurons with late post-saccadic response (LPS) represent the actual end-position of saccade. Remarkably, after the arrival of the LPS signal, the PPS neurons’ activity becomes highly correlated with the discrepancy between intended and actual end-position, and with the probability of making secondary (corrective) saccades. Thus, this neuronal computation might underlie the formation of saccadic error signals in PPC for speeding up saccadic learning and leading the occurrence of secondary saccade.