Representation of Visuomotor Space in the Parietal Lobe of the Monkey
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
The concept of representation is basic to our understanding of how the brain works. Since the days of phrenology, specific areas of the brain have been associated with specific perceptual and motor functions. Activity within a representation is the neural equivalent of the represented object: Activity within a visual representation corresponds to the presence of a visual stimulus, and activity within a motor representation predicts the occurrence of the represented movement. All well-understood sensory representations can be described as topological mappings from the receptor surface to the brain area, with some processing constraints superimposed on that representation. Thus, each hemiretina is represented in primary visual cortex (V1), such that a given locus in V1 is activated in response to stimulation of a given retinal locus. Within that locus, individual stimulus features, such as orientation and color, may be represented separately, but the primary organizing principle is retinotopic (Hubel and Wiesel...
