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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access first published online on July 27, 2007
This version published online on November 2, 2007
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm127
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© 2007 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Visual, Somatosensory, and Bimodal Activities in the Macaque Parietal Area PEc

Rossella Breveglieri, Claudio Galletti, Simona Monaco and Patrizia Fattori

Dipartimento di Fisiologia Umana e Generale, Piazza di Porta San Donato, 2, I-40126 Bologna, Italy

Address correspondence to Prof. P. Fattori, Dipartimento di Fisiologia Umana e Generale, Piazza di Porta San Donato, 2, I-40126 Bologna, Italy. Email: patrizia.fattori{at}unibo.it.

Caudal area PE (PEc) of the macaque posterior parietal cortex has been shown to be a crucial node in visuomotor coordination during reaching. The present study was aimed at studying visual and somatosensory organization of this cortical area. Visual stimulations activated 53% of PEc neurons. The overwhelming majority (89%) of these visual cells were best activated by a dark stimulus on a lighter background. Somatosensory stimulations activated 56% of PEc neurons: most were joint neurons (73%); a minority (24%) showed tactile receptive fields, most of them located on the arms. Area PEc has not a clear retinotopy or somatotopy. Among the cells tested for both somatosensory and visual sensitivity, 22% were bimodal, 25% unimodal somatosensory, 34% unimodal visual, and 19% were insensitive to either stimulation. No clear clustering of the different classes of sensory neurons was observed. Visual and somatosensory receptive fields of bimodal cells were not in register. The damage in the human brain of the likely homologous of macaque PEc produces deficits in locomotion and in whole-body interaction with the visual environment. Present data show that macaque PEc has sensory properties and a functional organization in line with the view of an involvement of this area in those processes.

Key Words: body-world interaction • dorsal visual stream • locomotion • multisensory • somatotopy

Funding to pay the Open Access publication charges for this article was provided by FP6-IST-027574-MATHESIS.

Figure 2 has been updated.


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