title: Object vision to hand action in macaque parietal, premotor, and motor cortices.
abstract: Grasping requires translating object geometries into appropriate hand shapes. How the brain computes these transformations is currently unclear. We investigated three key areas of the macaque cortical grasping circuit with microelectrode arrays and found cooperative but anatomically separated visual and motor processes. The parietal area AIP operated primarily in a visual mode. Its neuronal population revealed a specialization for shape processing, even for abstract geometries, and processed object features ultimately important for grasping. Premotor area F5 acted as a hub that shared the visual coding of AIP only temporarily and switched to highly dominant motor signals towards movement planning and execution. We visualize these non-discrete premotor signals that drive the primary motor cortex M1 to reflect the movement of the grasping hand. Our results reveal visual and motor features encoded in the grasping circuit and their communication to achieve transformation for grasping.
authors.affiliation: Neurobiology Laboratory, German Primate Center GmbH, Göttingen, Germany.|Laboratory of Neural Systems, The Rockefeller University, New York, United States.
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-1006-971X
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schaffelhofer
authors.affiliation: Neurobiology Laboratory, German Primate Center GmbH, Göttingen, Germany.|Department of Biology, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Hansjörg
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-6593-2800
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Scherberger
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D006225:Hand / Q000502:physiology*; D008251:Macaca; D009044:Motor Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D009068:Movement; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception
keywords: hand grasping; motor cortex; neuroscience; parallel recording; parietal cortex; premotor cortex; rhesus macaque; sensorimotor transformation