BIMANUAL AND EYE-HAND COORDINATION IN PARIETAL CORTEX

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

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Abstract

ABSTRACT Primates, including humans, are expert at coordinating their two arms together with their gaze to facilitate skilled behavior. Our overall goal is to understand the neural correlates of ?hand-eye-hand? coordination. We view bimanual and eye-hand coordination as flexible behavior that reflects task-specific interactions among neuronal circuits. A classical description of eye-hand coordination is that saccade and reach reaction times are correlated. Yet coordination is much more than just correlated start times, and coordination can take many forms. For example, we can use each of our hands to perform the same action at the same time, the same action at different times, or different actions at similar times. In seeking the neural correlates of coordination, particular circuits and structures in the brain appear to be associated with particular effectors and/or actions. We hypothesize that coordination involves specific modules exchanging information at specific times and, importantly, in a task-specific manner. This proposal will assess inter-areal and inter-hemispheric exchanges of information and gather evidence that they subserve a range of hand-eye-hand coordination challenges. We focus on motor planning in posterior parietal reach region (PRR) and the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), early modules in the visuomotor pathways for reaches and saccades, respectively. Animals will perform simple, natural unimanual and bimanual reaches and saccades while we measure cross-area LFP-LFP and spike-LFP coherence to identify task-speci?c patterns of information ?ow. We also introduce a new method to determine the direction of information transfer, a critical factor in understanding the overall computational picture. By describing hand-eye-hand coordination as a set of behaviors that are flexibly recruited to meet specific task goals, and by characterizing the neural correlates of this recruitment as a shifting network of inter-areal connectivity, this work has the potential to change the way we think about motor coordination.