title: Parietal cortex area 5 and visuomotor behavior.
abstract: For years, area 5 of the parietal cortex was thought to be a somatic sensory structure. This view was challenged by recordings during active movements in alert behaving monkeys, which suggested that area 5 also contained populations of neurons that issued nonspecific, context-dependent "commands" about intended motor responses. Recent studies have revealed that area 5 generates a representation of the spatiotemporal form of arm movements and arm postures, although the parameter space of that representation is still controversial. They also showed that many area 5 cells are recipient to centrally generated signals about the motor relevance of external sensory signals. These new results support the hypothesis that area 5 contributes to the sensorimotor guidance of motor behavior, by contributing to the somatomotor and visuomotor transformations presumed to underlie visually guided behavior. However, area 5 appears to be less directly implicated than the premotor cortex in the process of selecting the nature of the response to instructional signals.
authors.affiliation: Département de physiologie, Faculté de médecine, Université de Montréal, OC, Canada.
authors.forename: J F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Kalaska
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001519:Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*