Cerebral Cortex December 2003; 13:1276-1286
© Oxford University Press 2003
The Eye and the Hand: Neural Mechanisms and Network Models for Oculomanual Coordination in Parietal Cortex
1 Dipartimento di Fisiologia Umana e Farmacologia, Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza’, Piazzale A. Moro 5, 00185 Rome, Italy, 2 Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza’, Piazzale A. Moro 5, 00185 Rome, Italy, 3 INFM, Università di Roma ‘La Sapienza’, Piazzale A. Moro 5, 00185 Rome, Italy, 4 Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel
The coordinated action of the eye and the hand is necessary for the successful performance of a large variety of motor tasks based on visual information. Although at the output level the neural control systems for the eye and the hand are largely segregated, in the parietal cortex of the macaque monkey there exist populations of neurons able to combine ocular and manual signals on the basis of their spatial congruence. An expression of this congruence is the clustering of eye- and hand-related preferred directions of these neurons into a restricted region of the workspace, defined as field of global tuning. This domain may represent a neural substrate for the early composition of commands for coordinated oculo-manual actions. Here we study two different prototypical network models integrating inputs about retinal target location, eye position and hand position. In the first one, we model the interaction of these different signals, as it occurs at the afferent level, in a feed-forward fashion. In the second model, we assume that recurrent interactions are responsible for their combination. Both models account surprisingly well for the experimentally observed global tuning fields of parietal neurons. When we compare them with the experimental findings, no significant difference emerges between the two. Experiments potentially able to discriminate between these models could be performed.
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
 |
|
  S. Ferraina, E. Brunamonti, M. A. Giusti, S. Costa, A. Genovesio, and R. Caminiti Reaching in Depth: Hand Position Dominates over Binocular Eye Position in the Rostral Superior Parietal Lobule J. Neurosci., September 16, 2009; 29(37): 11461 - 11470. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 B. B. Averbeck, A. Battaglia-Mayer, C. Guglielmo, and R. Caminiti Statistical Analysis of Parieto-Frontal Cognitive-Motor Networks J Neurophysiol, September 1, 2009; 102(3): 1911 - 1920. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 G. Blohm, G. P. Keith, and J. D. Crawford Decoding the Cortical Transformations for Visually Guided Reaching in 3D Space Cereb Cortex, June 1, 2009; 19(6): 1372 - 1393. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
S. M. Beurze, F. P. de Lange, I. Toni, and W. P. Medendorp Integration of Target and Effector Information in the Human Brain During Reach Planning J Neurophysiol, January 1, 2007; 97(1): 188 - 199. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
C. Hamel-Paquet, L. E. Sergio, and J. F. Kalaska Parietal Area 5 Activity Does Not Reflect the Differential Time-Course of Motor Output Kinetics During Arm-Reaching and Isometric-Force Tasks J Neurophysiol, June 1, 2006; 95(6): 3353 - 3370. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|