Prioritized maps of space in human frontoparietal cortex

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Systems Neuroscience

Background:

• Priority maps are hypothesized to represent salient information in gaze-centered space using topographically organized neural populations.
• These maps are thought to guide behavior by spatially tagging relevant information.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify and characterize potential priority map candidates in the human brain.
• To investigate the properties of neural activity in these candidate areas during tasks involving spatial representation and maintenance.

Main Methods:

• Used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify retinotopically organized maps in the posterior intraparietal sulcus (IPS0-IPS3) and precentral sulcus (PCS).
• Analyzed persistent neural activity during working memory, covert attention, and saccade planning tasks.
• Employed cross-task decoding to assess the interchangeability of neural representations.

Main Results:

• Identified six retinotopic map candidates in the IPS and PCS.
• Observed increasing persistent activity along the anterior IPS and superior PCS during maintenance tasks.
• Demonstrated that decoders trained on one task could predict locations in other tasks in specific superior PCS and IPS2 regions.

Conclusions:

• The identified areas in the IPS and PCS exhibit properties consistent with priority maps.
• Neural activity patterns in these regions appear to be maintained across different cognitive tasks, suggesting functional interchangeability.
• These findings support the role of frontal and parietal cortex in forming and utilizing priority maps for behaviorally relevant information.