A putative human homologue of the macaque area PEc

Pitzalis, Sabrina; Serra, Chiara; Sulpizio, Valentina; Marco, Sara Di; Fattori, Patrizia; Galati, Gaspare; Galletti, Claudio

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.116092

Cited by 35 publications

(88 citation statements)

References 109 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Here, we confirm that pCi is a motion area responding to self-motion more than object-motion. This reinforce the hypothesis suggested in Pitzalis et al (2019) that area PEc integrates visually derived selfmotion signals with motor leg movement with the aim of guiding locomotion. Monkey PEc has visual neurons preferring optic flow with curve trajectories compatible with heading changes (Battaglia-Mayer et al, 2001;Raffi et al, 2002;Raffi, Carrozzini, Maioli, & Squatrito, 2010).…”

Section: Cortical Areas Preferring Onboard Movies (Inducing Self-mosupporting

confidence: 90%

“…In line with these previous studies, here using wide-field naturalistic stimuli simulating continuous heading changes we have found in the PEc motion responsiveness and a reliable preference for self-motion. This reinforce the hypothesis suggested in Pitzalis et al (2019) that area PEc integrates visually derived selfmotion signals with motor leg movement with the aim of guiding locomotion. We have also shown a preference for pure self-motion in the frontal SFS, although this region was not as selective as others were.…”

Section: Cortical Areas Preferring Onboard Movies (Inducing Self-mosupporting

confidence: 90%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Neural bases of self‐ and object‐motion in a naturalistic vision

Pitzalis

Serra

Sulpizio

et al. 2019

Human Brain Mapping

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

To plan movements toward objects our brain must recognize whether retinal displacement is due to self-motion and/or to object-motion. Here, we aimed to test whether motion areas are able to segregate these types of motion. We combined an eventrelated functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, brain mapping techniques, and wide-field stimulation to study the responsivity of motion-sensitive areas to pure and combined self-and object-motion conditions during virtual movies of a train running within a realistic landscape. We observed a selective response in MT to the pure object-motion condition, and in medial (PEc, pCi, CSv, and CMA) and lateral (PIC and LOR) areas to the pure self-motion condition. Some other regions (like V6) responded more to complex visual stimulation where both object-and self-motion were present.Among all, we found that some motion regions (V3A, LOR, MT, V6, and IPSmot) could extract object-motion information from the overall motion, recognizing the real movement of the train even when the images remain still (on the screen), or moved, because of self-movements. We propose that these motion areas might be good candidates for the "flow parsing mechanism," that is the capability to extract object-motion information from retinal motion signals by subtracting out the optic flow components. K E Y W O R D Sarea V6, brain mapping, flow parsing, fMRI, optic flow, wide-field

show abstract

Section: Cortical Areas Preferring Onboard Movies (Inducing Self-mosupporting

confidence: 90%

Section: Cortical Areas Preferring Onboard Movies (Inducing Self-mosupporting

confidence: 90%

Neural bases of self‐ and object‐motion in a naturalistic vision

Pitzalis

Serra

Sulpizio

et al. 2019

Human Brain Mapping

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In summary, beyond observing the presence of both handand foot-related representations (with a preference for the latter), as already showed by Pitzalis et al (2019), we found that area hPEc was preferentially activated by hand and foot pointing directed to visual target located in the lower compared to the upper VF. Beyond the regional approach, we also conducted a whole-brain analysis to have a general picture of all the brain regions activated by the lower > upper contrast.…”

Section: Lower Vf Preference For Limb Movements In Hpecsupporting

confidence: 75%

Lower visual field preference for the visuomotor control of limb movements in the human dorsomedial parietal cortex

et al. 2021

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Visual cues coming from the lower visual field (VF) play an important role in the visual guidance of upper and lower limb movements. A recently described region situated in the dorsomedial parietal cortex, area hPEc (Pitzalis et al. in NeuroImage 202:116092, 2019), might have a role in integrating visually derived information with somatomotor signals to guide limb interaction with the environment. In macaque, it has been demonstrated that PEc receives visual information mostly from the lower visual field but, to date, there has been no systematic investigation of VF preference in the newly defined human homologue of macaque area PEc (hPEc). Here we examined the VF preferences of hPEc while participants performed a visuomotor task implying spatially directed delayed eye-, hand- and foot-movements towards different spatial locations within the VF. By analyzing data as a function of the different target locations towards which upcoming movements were planned (and then executed), we observed the presence of asymmetry in the vertical dimension of VF in area hPEc, being this area more strongly activated by limb movements directed towards visual targets located in the lower compared to the upper VF. This result confirms the view, first advanced in macaque monkey, that PEc is involved in processing visual information to guide body interaction with the external environment, including locomotion. We also observed a contralateral dominance for the lower VF preference in the foot selective somatomotor cortex anterior to hPEc. This result might reflect the role of this cortex (which includes areas PE and S-I) in providing highly topographically organized signals, likely useful to achieve an appropriate foot posture during locomotion.

show abstract

“…This can be explained by considering that the flow field is a powerful stimulus able to activate different brain regions, although at different extent. As previously showed in Pitzalis et al (2019), the flow field stimulus activates a wide network of areas which includes not only the above-described high-level egomotion regions, but also the mesial, anterior part of the occipital lobe, such as the boundary between the posterior parahippocampal cortex and the anterior lingual gyrus and the conjunction between the calcarine sulcus and the parietal-occipital sulcus, where PPA and RSC are, respectively, located. However, the individual inspection of hemisphere-specific activation maps did not reveal consistent foci of activation in the cortical territory of PPA and RSC (Serra et al 2019).…”

Section: Scene-related Responses In Egomotion-selective Regions and mentioning

confidence: 57%

“…We reanalyzed data of one hundred thirty-four healthy adults (64 females, mean age 27.2, SD 4.7) who participated to previous studies from our lab (Boccia et al 2015 , 2017a , b , 2019 ; Pitzalis et al 2010 , 2013c , 2019 ; Tosoni et al 2015 ; Tullo et al 2018 ). 61 subjects (32 females, mean age 28.2, SD 4.1) were administered a scene/place stimulus, 96 subjects (50 females, mean age 27.2, SD 4.9) were administered a visual motion stimulus (flow fields) and 23 subjects both (15 females, mean age 29.3, SD 3.7).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A common neural substrate for processing scenes and egomotion-compatible visual motion

et al. 2020

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Neuroimaging studies have revealed two separate classes of category-selective regions specialized in optic flow (egomotioncompatible) processing and in scene/place perception. Despite the importance of both optic flow and scene/place recognition to estimate changes in position and orientation within the environment during self-motion, the possible functional link between egomotion-and scene-selective regions has not yet been established. Here we reanalyzed functional magnetic resonance images from a large sample of participants performing two well-known "localizer" fMRI experiments, consisting in passive viewing of navigationally relevant stimuli such as buildings and places (scene/place stimulus) and coherently moving fields of dots simulating the visual stimulation during self-motion (flow fields). After interrogating the egomotionselective areas with respect to the scene/place stimulus and the scene-selective areas with respect to flow fields, we found that the egomotion-selective areas V6+ and pIPS/V3A responded bilaterally more to scenes/places compared to faces, and all the scene-selective areas (parahippocampal place area or PPA, retrosplenial complex or RSC, and occipital place area or OPA) responded more to egomotion-compatible optic flow compared to random motion. The conjunction analysis between scene/place and flow field stimuli revealed that the most important focus of common activation was found in the dorsolateral parieto-occipital cortex, spanning the scene-selective OPA and the egomotion-selective pIPS/V3A. Individual inspection of the relative locations of these two regions revealed a partial overlap and a similar response profile to an independent low-level visual motion stimulus, suggesting that OPA and pIPS/V3A may be part of a unique motion-selective complex specialized in encoding both egomotion-and scene-relevant information, likely for the control of navigation in a structured environment.

show abstract

A putative human homologue of the macaque area PEc

Cited by 35 publications

References 109 publications

Neural bases of self‐ and object‐motion in a naturalistic vision

Neural bases of self‐ and object‐motion in a naturalistic vision

Lower visual field preference for the visuomotor control of limb movements in the human dorsomedial parietal cortex

A common neural substrate for processing scenes and egomotion-compatible visual motion

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About