Integration of Visuospatial and Effector Information during Symbolically Cued Limb Movements in Monkey Lateral Intraparietal Area

By Jeff Oristaglio, D. Schneider, Puiu F. Balan, Jacqueline Gottlieb. 2006

115 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Natural behavior requires close but flexible coordination between attention, defined as selection for perception, and action. In recent years a distributed network including the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) has been implicated in visuospatial selection for attention and rapid eye movements (saccades), but the relation between the attentional and motor functions of this area remains unclear. Here we tested LIP neurons in a task that involved not an ocular but a manual operant response. Monkeys viewed a display containing one cue and several distractors and reported the orientation of the cue (right- or left-facing) by releasing one of two bars grasped, respectively, with the right or left hand. The movement in this task thus was associated with (cued by), but not directed toward, the visual stimulus. A large majority of neurons responded more when the cue rather than when a distractor was in their receptive field, suggesting that they contribute to the attentional selection of the cue. A fraction of these neurons also was modulated by limb release, thus simultaneously encoding cue location and the active limb. The results suggest that the LIP links behaviorally relevant visual information with motor variables relevant for solving a task in a wide range of circumstances involving goal-directed or symbolically cued movements and eye as well as limb movements. A central function of the LIP may be to coordinate visual and motor selection during a wide variety of behaviors.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

The Brain's Router: A Cortical Network Model of Serial Processing in the Primate Brain (2010, background): “Many of these cells are tuned to categories of stimuli that are associated with a particular behavioral response [149–151] and integrate evidence in favor of one of a number of possible actions until a threshold is reached, just as is required by the model’s router [152–154].”
Attention, learning and the value of information (2012, methodology): “An example of such a study is the experiment shown in Figure 4A, in which we trained monkeys to report the orientation of a peripheral target (a right-or left-facing letter ‘‘E’’) by releasing a bar (Oristaglio et al., 2006).”
Reward modulates attention independently of action value in posterior parietal cortex (2009, unknown): “A central question in neuroscience concerns the mechanisms by which animals make reward-based decisions (Sutton and Barto, 1998; Sugrue et al., 2005; Bogacz, 2007).”
Attention, Intention, and Priority in the Parietal Lobe (2010, background): “…receptive field, information pertaining to stimulus shape (Sereno & Maunsell 1998), direction of motion (Fanini & Assad 2009), categorization (Freedman & Assad 2006), color (Toth & Assad 2002), handedness (Oristaglio et al. 2006), and even numerosity (Roitman et al. 2007) has been found in LIP.”
Value-based gain control: divisive normalization in parietal cortex (2011, background): “In addition to responses related to target selection and action value, LIP neurons also show activity associated with the allocation of covert attention, driven by intrinsic visual salience or task relevance (Bisley and Goldberg, 2003, 2010; Oristaglio et al., 2006).”