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Related Concept Videos

Motor and Sensory Areas of the Cortex01:14

Motor and Sensory Areas of the Cortex

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The cerebral cortex, the brain's outermost layer, is pivotal in processing complex cognitive tasks, emotions, and various sensory inputs and executing voluntary motor activities. This intricate structure is divided into three primary functional areas: the motor areas, sensory areas, and association areas.
Motor Areas
The motor areas located in the frontal lobe are central to controlling voluntary movements. This region is further subdivided into the primary motor cortex and the premotor cortex....
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Somatosensory, Motor, and Association Cortex01:23

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The somatosensory cortex in the parietal lobes is crucial for interpreting sensory data such as touch, temperature, and proprioception. The somatosensory cortex, situated in the parietal lobes, plays a vital role in interpreting sensory information like touch, temperature, and proprioception—awareness of body position. This specialized brain region features an organized structure wherein neurons at the top primarily process sensations originating from the lower body. In contrast, those at...
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Major Somatic Sensory Pathways01:28

Major Somatic Sensory Pathways

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Sensory impulses related to touch, pressure, vibration, and proprioception from various body parts, such as the limbs, trunk, neck, and posterior head, travel to the cerebral cortex through the posterior column-medial lemniscus pathway. The pathway’s name derives from the two white-matter tracts that convey the impulses: the spinal cord's posterior column and the brainstem's medial lemniscus. First-order sensory neurons extend their axons into the spinal cord, forming the...
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Indirect Motor Pathways01:22

Indirect Motor Pathways

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The indirect motor or extrapyramidal pathways originate in the brainstem, the lower portion of the brain that connects it to the spinal cord. They consist of several distinct tracts, each with specialized functions. The four main tracts of the indirect motor pathways are the vestibulospinal tract, the reticulospinal tract, the tectospinal tract, and the rubrospinal tract.
The vestibulospinal tract originates in the vestibular nuclei of the brainstem. The vestibular system detects changes in...
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Overview of Somatic Sensory Pathways01:29

Overview of Somatic Sensory Pathways

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Somatic sensory or somatosensory pathways refer to the neural pathways that carry information related to touch, pressure, pain, temperature, and proprioception from the skin, muscles, tendons, and joints to the brain. These pathways involve several stages of processing and integration of sensory information.
The somatosensory system is divided into three main pathways: the dorsal (or posterior) column-medial lemniscus, spinothalamic (or anterolateral), and spinocerebellar pathways.
The dorsal...
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Somatosensation01:33

Somatosensation

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The somatosensory system relays sensory information from the skin, mucous membranes, limbs, and joints. Somatosensation is more familiarly known as the sense of touch. A typical somatosensory pathway includes three types of long neurons: primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary neurons have cell bodies located near the spinal cord in groups of neurons called dorsal root ganglia. The sensory neurons of ganglia innervate designated areas of skin called dermatomes.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 29, 2026

A Fully Automated Rodent Conditioning Protocol for Sensorimotor Integration and Cognitive Control Experiments
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A Fully Automated Rodent Conditioning Protocol for Sensorimotor Integration and Cognitive Control Experiments

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Navigating actions through the rodent parietal cortex.

Jonathan R Whitlock1

  • 1Department of Neuroscience, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim, Norway.

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
|May 27, 2014
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Neurons in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) primarily signal movement patterns over spatial location during navigation. This suggests the PPC synthesizes goal-directed movement sequences for navigation.

Keywords:
cognitive motor functionparietal cortexparieto-frontal networkrodent modelspatial navigation

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Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Behavioral Neuroscience

Background:

  • The posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is implicated in diverse cognitive functions, including attention, memory, spatial processing, and movement planning.
  • PPC integrates sensory and motor information, with neurons often encoding both spatial context and goal-directed movements.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the relative contribution of spatial information versus motor signaling in the PPC.
  • To understand the neural mechanisms underlying spatial navigation and motor planning.

Main Methods:

  • Single-unit recordings were performed in the PPC of freely behaving rats.
  • Neural activity was analyzed during navigational tasks with manipulated environmental spatial layouts and locomotor behaviors.

Main Results:

  • PPC neurons demonstrated a predominant sensitivity to the structure of locomotor actions.
  • A significant subset of PPC cells encoded upcoming movements over 1 second in advance.
  • Spatial information appeared secondary to motor action encoding in PPC.

Conclusions:

  • The PPC's key role in navigation may be synthesizing goal-directed behavioral sequences.
  • Rodent PPC serves as a valuable model for studying the cellular mechanisms of spatial motor planning.
  • Findings challenge traditional views by highlighting motor action structure over spatial coding in PPC.