[Hierarchical Decision-Making Mechanism of the Frontal Lobe]

Actions performed by humans require various levels of volitional control, ranging from highly practiced, automatic actions to those done in unfamiliar environments which necessitate deliberate controls. The multiple cortical motor areas in the frontal lobe regulate actions that vary in the levels of automaticity vs. intentionality. Further more, a part of the medial prefrontal cortex was found to contribute to the selection of the behavioral tactics, an internal protocol of how to decide what to do, which is a more abstract level of decision making than the selection of action per se. The frontal lobe as a whole functions as a hierarchically organized neural network that regulate both automatic and intentional actions.