Integration of visual and motor functional streams in the human brain

A long-standing difficulty in brain research has been to disentangle how information flows across circuits composed by multiple local and distant cerebral areas. At the large-scale level, several brain imaging methods have contributed to the understanding of those circuits by capturing the covariance or coupling patterns of blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) activity between distributed brain regions. The hypothesis is that underlying information processes are closely associated to synchronized brain activity, and therefore to the functional connectivity structure of the human brain. In this study, we have used a recently developed method called stepwise functional connectivity analysis. Our results show that motor and visual connectivity merge in a multimodal integration network that links together perception, action and cognition in the human functional connectome.