1
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Effector selection precedes reach planning in the dorsal parietofrontal cortex.

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Experimental evidence and computational modeling suggest that target selection for reaching is associated with the parallel encoding of multiple movement plans in the dorsomedial posterior parietal cortex (dmPPC) and the caudal part of the dorsal premotor cortex (PMdc). We tested the hypothesis that a similar mechanism also accounts for arm selection for unimanual reaching, with simultaneous and separate motor goal representations for the left and right arms existing in the right and left parietofrontal cortex, respectively. We recorded simultaneous electroencephalograms and functional MRI and studied a condition in which subjects had to select the appropriate arm for reaching based on the color of an appearing visuospatial target, contrasting it to a condition in which they had full knowledge of the arm to be used before target onset. We showed that irrespective of whether subjects had to select the arm or not, activity in dmPPC and PMdc was only observed contralateral to the reaching arm after target onset. Furthermore, the latency of activation in these regions was significantly delayed when arm selection had to be achieved during movement planning. Together, these results demonstrate that effector selection is not achieved through the simultaneous specification of motor goals tied to the two arms in bilateral parietofrontal cortex, but suggest that a motor goal is formed in these regions only after an arm is selected for action.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          J. Neurophysiol.
          Journal of neurophysiology
          1522-1598
          0022-3077
          Jul 2012
          : 108
          : 1
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Département de Kinanthropologie, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. pierre-michel.bernier@usherbrooke.ca
          Article
          jn.00011.2012
          10.1152/jn.00011.2012
          22457458
          8666ee9b-4282-4fcb-a288-7cafa921aed0
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article