The medial posterior parietal area V6A and the control of arm actions in depth
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1
University of Bologna, Pharmacy and Biotechnology, Italy
A crucial region of the brain involved in controlling visually guided arm actions in both human and non-human primates is the medial part of posterior parietal cortex. Within this cortical sector, V6A represents a node of the parieto-frontal network involved in arm movement control. Here we show that V6A neurons are involved in several aspects of ocular and arm action control, together with the encoding of sensory signals dealing with somatosensory and visual monitoring of prensile actions. The encoding of action-in-depth by single cells had not been studied till recently in V6A. Here we show that the activity of many V6A neurons is modulated by vergence eye movements aimed at fixating visual targets in depth. These signals are integrated, often at the level of single cells, with information about the direction of gaze, thus encoding spatial locations in 3D space. Moreover, 3D eye position signals seem to be further exploited at two additional levels of neural processing: a) in determining whether targets are located in the peripersonal or extrapersonal space, and b) in shaping the spatial tuning of arm movement related activity towards reachable targets. In the majority of the cells, a significant effect of both target direction and depth was found in all epochs of an instructed-delay reaching task performed in darkness. Spatial modulations of fixation activity were generally maintained across planning and subsequent reach-related epochs. Spatial preferences were kept across epochs and were evenly distributed throughout the reachable space.
These findings are in line with studies in putative homologous regions in human medial posterior parietal cortex and point to a role of this cortical sector in the processing of eye position signals in order to jointly encode spatial location and hand movement information.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by European Union Grant FP7-IST-217077-EYESHOTS, by Ministero dell’Universita` e
della Ricerca (Italy), and by Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna (Italy).
Keywords:
reaching movements,
depth,
Eye Movements,
planning,
movement preparation,
Executive Function
Conference:
4th Conference of the Mediterrarnean Neuroscience Society, Istanbul, Türkiye, 30 Sep - 3 Oct, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Abstracts
Citation:
Fattori
P,
Hadjidimitrakis
K,
Breveglieri
R,
Bosco
A and
Galletti
C
(2013). The medial posterior parietal area V6A and the control of arm actions in depth.
Conference Abstract:
4th Conference of the Mediterrarnean Neuroscience Society.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2013.210.00033
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Received:
25 Jan 2013;
Published Online:
11 Apr 2013.
*
Correspondence:
Prof. Patrizia Fattori, University of Bologna, Pharmacy and Biotechnology, Bologna, 40126, Italy, patrizia.fattori@unibo.it