Why it is a question
THEORY-245 holds what the COGITATE consortium measured: prefrontal cortex carried a clearly seen image’s category but not its identity, and a face’s orientation at most weakly, and no prefrontal site showed the preregistered onset-and-offset response. The signals were iEEG high gamma, MEG source power and BOLD. Whether prefrontal cortex lacks identity and orientation in other signals, and stays silent at offset under an equally sensitive test, is open.
What would answer it
A second recording of the same pattern with a different method or sample: single-unit or dense bilateral prefrontal recordings, in a no-report or task-irrelevant design, showing that a seen image’s category is present in prefrontal cortex while its identity and orientation, decodable posteriorly in the same subjects, are absent there, with Bayesian support for the absence; and an offset test with the same sensitivity. The answer is no if prefrontal identity or orientation coding of seen, task-irrelevant images appears in signals COGITATE did not sample (single units, low frequencies, activity-silent states probed by perturbation), or a prefrontal response appears at stimulus offset under matched conditions. More demonstrations that category is decodable in prefrontal cortex cannot settle it.