Linkage of multiple visual and motor properties in single neuron activity of monkey’s anterior intraparietal area
Year: 2019
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Neural coding of objects and actions involves many parieto-frontal areas including the anterior intraparietal area (AIP). Many studies show that neurons of this area become active not only during action execution but also during the observation of other’s actions both when performed live in front of the monkey and when presented in a videotaped format. Nonetheless, no study has ever investigated the possible linkage between these multiple visual and motor properties, preventing to understand the underling coding principles. To address this issue, we investigated AIP neuron activity during a large set of execution and action observation tasks. We recorded 134 neurons showing a wide variety of functional properties, with most of them responding during action execution and/or object presentation, and most of them also discharged during observation of actions. Among these latter, most encode both live and filmed actions, with a wide variety of mixed relationship with their motor properties. By means of an unsupervised clustering of functional properties at the population level, we have been able to show that the underlying coding principle of AIP neurons emphasize the relevance of the context in terms of space in which object and actions are presented and the agent who is expected to act in that context.
Source: DSpasce-unipr
Author: Bano, Eleonora
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3041836000