The space for memory in posterior parietal cortex: Re-analyses of bottom-up attention data

The ventral (VPC) and dorsal sectors of the posterior parietal cortex are long known to mediate bottom-up and top-down attention to the external space. Because these regions also are implicated in retrieval of episodic memories, we proposed they also mediate attention to the internal (memory) space. One objection to this Attention to Memory hypothesis is that parietal regions involved in directing attention to percepts and memory are spatially adjacent but not overlapping, suggesting that different neural mechanisms are involved in each. This misalignment is most pronounced in VPC. Here, we re-examine fMRI data, and show that (1) different VPC subregions are associated with different aspects of bottom-up attention to the external space, (2) only VPC subregions showing invalid cue (but not oddball) effects overlap with those associated with episodic memory retrieval, leading us to conclude that (3) the same regions that signal unexpected percepts also signal unexpected memories. These findings are consistent with the 'overarching view' of VPC as deploying bottom-up attention during both perception and episodic memory retrieval, and suggest that the degree of anatomical convergence across the two domains depends on the correspondence between the specific bottom-up attention demands of perceptual and memory tasks.