Encoding of spatial location by posterior parietal neurons

Abstract

The cortex of the inferior parietal lobule in primates is important for spatial perception and spatially oriented behavior. Recordings of single neurons in this area in behaving monkeys showed that the visual sensitivity of the retinotopic receptive fields changes systematically with the angle of gaze. The activity of many of the neurons can be largely described by the product of a gain factor that is a function of the eye position and the response profile of the visual receptive field. This operation produces an eye position-dependent tuning for locations in head-centered coordinate space.