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Many neurons in the monkey ventral premotor area F5 discharge selectively when the monkey grasps an object with a specific grip. Of these, the motor neurons are active only during grasping execution, whereas the visuomotor neurons also respond to object presentation. Here we assessed whether the activity of 90 task-related F5 neurons recorded from two macaque monkeys during the performance of a visually-guided grasping task can be used as input to pattern recognition algorithms aiming to decode different grips. The features exploited for the decoding were the mean firing rate and the mean interspike interval calculated over different time spans of the movement period (all neurons) or of the object presentation period (visuomotor neurons). A support vector machine (SVM) algorithm was applied to the neural activity recorded while the monkey grasped two sets of objects. The original set contained three …