TY - JOUR
T1 - Dorsal Premotor Neurons Encode the Relative Position of the Hand, Eye, and Goal during Reach Planning
AU - Pesaran, Bijan
AU - Nelson, Matthew J.
AU - Andersen, Richard A.
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to acknowledge valuable conversations with Chris Buneo and helpful comments on the manuscript from Alex Gail and Sam Musallam. This work was supported by NIH grants EY05522-21 and MH62528-01, the DARPA BioInfoMicro program, and a Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund to B.P. We thank Tessa Yao for editorial assistance, Kelsie Pejsa and Leah Martel for animal care, and Viktor Shcherbatyuk for technical assistance.
PY - 2006/7/6
Y1 - 2006/7/6
N2 - When reaching to grasp an object, we often move our arm and orient our gaze together. How are these movements coordinated? To investigate this question, we studied neuronal activity in the dorsal premotor area (PMd) and the medial intraparietal area (area MIP) of two monkeys while systematically varying the starting position of the hand and eye during reaching. PMd neurons encoded the relative position of the target, hand, and eye. MIP neurons encoded target location with respect to the eye only. These results indicate that whereas MIP encodes target locations in an eye-centered reference frame, PMd uses a relative position code that specifies the differences in locations between all three variables. Such a relative position code may play an important role in coordinating hand and eye movements by computing their relative position.
AB - When reaching to grasp an object, we often move our arm and orient our gaze together. How are these movements coordinated? To investigate this question, we studied neuronal activity in the dorsal premotor area (PMd) and the medial intraparietal area (area MIP) of two monkeys while systematically varying the starting position of the hand and eye during reaching. PMd neurons encoded the relative position of the target, hand, and eye. MIP neurons encoded target location with respect to the eye only. These results indicate that whereas MIP encodes target locations in an eye-centered reference frame, PMd uses a relative position code that specifies the differences in locations between all three variables. Such a relative position code may play an important role in coordinating hand and eye movements by computing their relative position.
KW - SYSNEURO
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=33745485155&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=33745485155&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.neuron.2006.05.025
DO - 10.1016/j.neuron.2006.05.025
M3 - Article
C2 - 16815337
AN - SCOPUS:33745485155
SN - 0896-6273
VL - 51
SP - 125
EP - 134
JO - Neuron
JF - Neuron
IS - 1
ER -