Distinct saccade planning and endogenous visuospatial attention maps in parietal cortex: A basis for functional...

Parietal cortex activity contributes to higher-level cognitive processes, including endogenous visual attention and saccade planning. While visual attention is the process of selecting pertinent information from the environment, saccade planning may involve motor attention in the planning of a specific movement, including the process of selecting the correct path. We isolated areas in parietal cortex involved in saccade planning, while controlling visual attention, to understand the relationship between the two processes. Using our novel stimulus, participants performed a delayed saccade task and an endogenous covert visuospatial attention task with peripheral targets in identical locations. We compared multiple target locations across the two domains at the level of the individual to better understand variability in the relationship between these two maps. The anterior-posterior organization of saccade planning and visual attention maps varied among, but not within, participants, and 14-29% of the maps for each task overlapped one another across hemispheres. Interestingly, within the region of co-activation, over 67% of the voxels responded to the same location for both tasks. These cortical areas of overlap may represent regions of the brain specifically involved in the transfer of information from vision to action along the visuomotor pathway. These results further establish the relationship between maps associated with saccade planning and visual attention at the individual level, indicating the lack of a single saliency map in parietal cortex.