Only Coherent Spiking in Posterior Parietal Cortex Coordinates Looking and Reaching

Dean, Heather L.; Hagan, Maureen A.; Pesaran, Bijan

doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2011.12.035

Cited by 96 publications

(95 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Of 17 and 37 cells with linear tuning by depth and direction, respectively, during the perisaccadic epoch, 15 and 35 had the same tuning during the Fix epoch. Effector selectivity has been studied recently in parietal areas MIP and LIP and was shown to be related to information coding and decision making (Dean et al 2012;de Lafuente et al 2015). Our data show that PEc processes reach either independently from or together with saccades.…”

Section: Relationship Between Eye Position and Arm Movement Signalssupporting

confidence: 57%

Overlapping representations for reach depth and direction in caudal superior parietal lobule of macaques

Hadjidimitrakis

Bò

Breveglieri

et al. 2015

Journal of Neurophysiology

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-Reaching movements in the real world have typically a direction and a depth component. Despite numerous behavioral studies, there is no consensus on whether reach coordinates are processed in separate or common visuomotor channels. Furthermore, the neural substrates of reach depth in parietal cortex have been ignored in most neurophysiological studies. In the medial posterior parietal area V6A, we recently demonstrated the strong presence of depth signals and the extensive convergence of depth and direction information on single neurons during all phases of a fixate-to-reach task in 3-dimensional (3D) space. Using the same task, in the present work we examined the processing of direction and depth information in area PEc of the caudal superior parietal lobule (SPL) in three Macaca fascicularis monkeys. Across the task, depth and direction had a similar, high incidence of modulatory effect. The effect of direction was stronger than depth during the initial fixation period. As the task progressed toward arm movement execution, depth tuning became more prominent than directional tuning and the number of cells modulated by both depth and direction increased significantly. Neurons tuned by depth showed a small bias for far peripersonal space. Cells with directional modulations were more frequently tuned toward contralateral spatial locations, but ipsilateral space was also represented. These findings, combined with results from neighboring areas V6A and PE, support a rostral-to-caudal gradient of overlapping representations for reach depth and direction in SPL. These findings also support a progressive change from visuospatial (vergence angle) to somatomotor representations of 3D space in SPL.

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Section: Relationship Between Eye Position and Arm Movement Signalssupporting

confidence: 57%

Overlapping representations for reach depth and direction in caudal superior parietal lobule of macaques

Hadjidimitrakis

Bò

Breveglieri

et al. 2015

Journal of Neurophysiology

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“…In this regard, phase coding in PFC may reflect a basic mechanism of flexible behavioral control during WM. Moreover, such a mechanism could be applied generically to organize distinct information streams in support of other "top-down" processes that evoke coherent activity, such as attention (38), motor coordination (39), and decision making (40).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiple component networks support working memory in prefrontal cortex

Markowitz

Curtis

Pesaran

2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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112

103

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Lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) is regarded as the hub of the brain's working memory (WM) system, but it remains unclear whether WM is supported by a single distributed network or multiple specialized network components in this region. To investigate this problem, we recorded from neurons in PFC while monkeys made delayed eye movements guided by memory or vision. We show that neuronal responses during these tasks map to three anatomically specific modes of persistent activity. The first two modes encode early and late forms of information storage, whereas the third mode encodes response preparation. Neurons that reflect these modes are concentrated at different anatomical locations in PFC and exhibit distinct patterns of coordinated firing rates and spike timing during WM, consistent with distinct networks. These findings support multiple component models of WM and consequently predict distinct failures that could contribute to neurologic dysfunction.working memory | prefrontal cortex | macaque | coherence H igh-level cognition depends on the ability to translate stored information about recent experience into a behaviorally appropriate response, an ability known as working memory (WM). WM relies on a storage process that actively maintains information and a control process that manipulates stored information to support the selection and preparation of a contingent response (1-3). The neural mechanisms that support WM involve networks that are broadly distributed throughout the brain (4-7) and rely heavily on the prefrontal cortex (PFC) for normal operation (6-9). However, the degree to which WM is supported by a single distributed network or multiple specialized network components in PFC remains unclear (6, 10, 11), hindering progress in the search for neurocognitive therapies to treat disorders of cognition (12).Persistent spiking activity is commonly thought to reflect the mechanistic basis of WM in PFC (13-16). This activity manifests in different ways, including time-varying neuronal responses that decay, ramp up, or are stable in time during memory delays. Although such a diversity of responses could reflect distinct modes of persistent activity, it has long been a standard practice to treat all persistently active neurons in PFC as representative of a single composite WM function that supports the maintenance and manipulation of information necessary for memory-guided behavior (14,(17)(18)(19). The implicit assumption that the representations of stored information and contingent responses overlap at the neural circuit level contrasts with an alternate view, which suggests that PFC primarily encodes the selection and preparation of responses (6,10,11). This difference highlights the need to directly investigate the circuit-level organization of storage and response preparationrelated activity in PFC.We address this problem here, using a simple manipulation of WM in concert with large-scale recordings from neurons across lateral PFC of macaque monkeys. By mapping neural activity during memory and visual del...

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“…Beta suppression has been considered as an "undifferentiated reflection of neural activity" (26) because the amplitude of suppression is not clearly modulated by motor parameters like direction (36), speed (26), or duration (37). However, in oculomotor regions, it gets modulated in an epoch close to the initiation of the saccade but the modulation characteristics itself might differ between different cortical regions, from being a spatially invariant suppression of activity in regions like LIP before a saccade (21,38) or a spatially selective elevation of activity in regions like the posterior parietal cortex before a coordinated reach and saccade (39). We investigated beta modulation in the FEF and characterized the properties of beta band activity in the visual, delay, and the saccadic epochs to check for any functional significance during the visuomotor transformation process.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simultaneous analysis of the LFP and spiking activity reveals essential components of a visuomotor transformation in the frontal eye field

Sendhilnathan

Basu

Murthy

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The frontal eye field (FEF) is a key brain region to study visuomotor transformations because the primary input to FEF is visual in nature, whereas its output reflects the planning of behaviorally relevant saccadic eye movements. In this study, we used a memory-guided saccade task to temporally dissociate the visual epoch from the saccadic epoch through a delay epoch, and used the local field potential (LFP) along with simultaneously recorded spike data to study the visuomotor transformation process. We showed that visual latency of the LFP preceded spiking activity in the visual epoch, whereas spiking activity preceded LFP activity in the saccade epoch. We also found a spatially tuned elevation in gamma band activity (30-70 Hz), but not in the corresponding spiking activity, only during the delay epoch, whose activity predicted saccade reaction times and the cells' saccade tuning. In contrast, beta band activity (13-30 Hz) showed a nonspatially selective suppression during the saccade epoch. Taken together, these results suggest that motor plans leading to saccades may be generated internally within the FEF from local activity represented by gamma activity.T he process of generating a motor plan from visual information entails a visuomotor transformation. The frontal eye field (FEF) is one of the cortical regions that contributes to the visuomotor transformation process by participating in critical events such as target selection (1-3) and saccade preparation (4-6). In addition to FEF, other oculomotor areas such as the lateral intraparietal cortex (7), the supplementary eye fields (8), the superior colliculus (9), and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (10) also possess neurons with similar properties as FEF neurons. Thus, a central question that remains unresolved is to what extent do the response properties of FEF neurons represent a cause versus a consequence of computations occurring elsewhere.One approach to resolve this question of causation versus consequence, in the context of target selection, was the use of simultaneously recorded local field potentials (LFP) and spikesmaking use of the idea that the LFP represents synchronized input coming into a brain area, as opposed to spiking activity, which is thought to represent output (11)(12)(13)(14)(15). Using this approach, Monosov et al. showed that FEF received spatially nonselective input through LFP earlier than spikes in the early visual epoch; however, in the consequent target selection epoch, spiking activity of FEF neurons evolved spatial selectivity and actively discriminated between the behaviorally relevant and the irrelevant stimuli earlier than the LFP (1). Such a temporal relationship between LFP and spikes during target selection in FEF has also been studied by others using simultaneously recorded LFP and spikes, converging to the same evidence (5, 16). However, whereas these studies suggest a causal role for FEF in visual selection, the causal role of FEF in saccade preparation has not yet been reported. In this study, we asked whether sac...

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Only Coherent Spiking in Posterior Parietal Cortex Coordinates Looking and Reaching

Cited by 96 publications

References 58 publications

Overlapping representations for reach depth and direction in caudal superior parietal lobule of macaques

Overlapping representations for reach depth and direction in caudal superior parietal lobule of macaques

Multiple component networks support working memory in prefrontal cortex

Simultaneous analysis of the LFP and spiking activity reveals essential components of a visuomotor transformation in the frontal eye field

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