parietal areas
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CNStalk: Anatomo-functional organisation of the grasping network in the primate brain
Cortical functions result from the conjoint activity of different, reciprocally connected areas working together as large-scale functionally specialized networks. In the macaque brain, neural tracers and functional data have provided evidence for functionally specialized large-scale cortical networks involving temporal, parietal, and frontal areas. One of these networks, the lateral grasping network, appears to play a primary role in controlling hand action organization and recognition. Available functional and tractograpy data suggest the existence of a human counterpart of this network.
Understanding sensorimotor control at global and local scales
The brain is remarkably flexible, and appears to instantly reconfigure its processing depending on what’s needed to solve a task at hand: fMRI studies indicate that distal brain areas appear to fluidly couple and decouple with one another depending on behavioral context. We investigated how the brain coordinates its activity across areas to inform complex, top-down control behaviors. Animals were trained to perform a novel brain machine interface task to guide a visual cursor to a reward zone, using activity recorded with widefield calcium imaging. This allowed us to screen for cortical areas implicated in causal neural control of the visual object. Animals could decorrelate normally highly-correlated areas to perform the task, and used an explore-exploit search in neural activity space to discover successful strategies. Higher visual and parietal areas were more active during the task in expert animals. Single unit recordings targeted to these areas indicated that the sensory representation of an object was sensitive to an animal’s subjective sense of controlling it.
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