Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 14, Issue 1, July 2001, Pages S46-S51
NeuroImage

Regular Article
Space Coding in Primate Posterior Parietal Cortex

https://doi.org/10.1006/nimg.2001.0817Get rights and content

Abstract

Neuropsychological studies of patients with lesions of right frontal (premotor) or posterior parietal cortex often show severe impairments of attentive sensorimotor behavior. Such patients frequently manifest symptoms like hemispatial neglect or extinction. Interestingly, these behavioral deficits occur across different sensory modalities and are often organized in head- or body-centered coordinates. These neuropsychological data provide evidence for the existence of a network of polymodal areas in (primate) premotor and inferior parietal cortex representing visual spatial information in a nonretinocentric frame of reference. In the monkey, a highly modular structural and functional specialization has been demonstrated especially within posterior parietal cortex. One such functionally specialized area is the ventral intraparietal area (VIP). This area is located in the fundus of the intraparietal sulcus and contains many neurons that show polymodal directionally selective discharges, i.e., these neurons respond to moving visual, tactile, vestibular, or auditory stimuli. Many of these neurons also encode sensory information from different modalities in a common, probably head-centered, frame of reference. Functional imaging data on humans reveal a network of cortical areas that respond to polymodal stimuli conveying motion information. One of these regions of activation is located in the depth of human intraparietal sulcus. Accordingly, it is suggested that this area constitutes the human equivalent of monkey area VIP. The functional role of area VIP for polymodal spatial perception in normals as well as the functional implications of lesions of area VIP in parietal patients needs to be established in further experiments.

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      These frontoparietal areas are connected while having direct and indirect projections to the cortico-spinal tracts forming several frontoparietal multisensory-motor networks with many sensory-motor functions (Andersen et al., 1997; Rizzolatti et al. 1997b, 2002). Studies on humans revealed the presence of detailed auditory, visual, and tactile multisensory representation of space immediately around the body (Bremmer et al., 2001a; Ladavas et al., 2001; Làdavas et al., 1998; Sereno and Huang, 2006). Bremmer et al. (2001) using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), showed similar brain activity in humans compared to monkeys when facing visual, tactile, and auditory stimuli (Bremmer et al., 2001b).

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    To whom correspondence and reprint requests should be addressed at Department of Zoology and Neurobiology, Ruhr-University Bochum, D-44780 BOCHUM, Germany. Fax: ++49-234-321-4278. E-mail: [email protected].

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