Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on August 23, 2007
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhm146
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Cortical Connections of the Macaque Anterior Intraparietal (AIP) Area
1 Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Sezione di Fisiologia, Università di Parma, I43100 Parma, Italy, 2 Department of Physiology, Kinki University School of Medicine, Osaka-sayama 589-8511, Japan, 3 Current address: Department of Pharmacology and Physiology, University of Rochester School of Medicine, Rochester, NY 14642, USA
Address correspondence to Prof. Giuseppe Luppino, Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Sezione di Fisiologia, Università di Parma, Via Volturno 39, I-43100 Parma, Italy. Email: luppino{at}unipr.it
We traced the cortical connections of the anterior intraparietal (AIP) area, which is known to play a crucial role in visuomotor transformations for grasping. AIP displayed major connections with 1) areas of the inferior parietal lobule convexity, the rostral part of the lateral intraparietal area and the SII region; 2) ventral visual stream areas of the lower bank of the superior temporal sulcus and the middle temporal gyrus; and 3) the premotor area F5 and prefrontal areas 46 and 12. Additional connections were observed with the caudal intraparietal area and the ventral part of the frontal eye field. This study suggests that visuomotor transformations for object-oriented actions, processed in AIP, rely not only on dorsal visual stream information related to the object's physical properties but also on ventral visual stream information related to object identity. The identification of direct anatomical connections with the inferotemporal cortex suggests that AIP also has a unique role in linking the parietofrontal network of areas involved in sensorimotor transformations for grasping with areas involved in object recognition. Thus, AIP could represent a crucial node in a cortical circuit in which hand-related sensory and motor signals gain access to representations of object identity for tactile object recognition.
Key Words: dorsal visual stream • grasping • parietal cortex • ventral visual stream • visuomotor transformations • 3D object coding
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