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Updated: Jul 21, 2025

Tactile Semiautomatic Passive-Finger Angle Stimulator TSPAS
Published on: July 30, 2020
Dynamic spatial coding in parietal cortex mediates tactile-motor transformation
Janina Klautke1, Celia Foster2,3, W Pieter Medendorp4
1Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
Abstract:
Movements towards touch on the body require integrating tactile location and body posture information. Tactile processing and movement planning both rely on posterior parietal cortex (PPC) but their interplay is not understood. Here, human participants received tactile stimuli on their crossed and uncrossed feet, dissociating stimulus location relative to anatomy versus external space. Participants pointed to the touch or the equivalent location on the other foot, which dissociates sensory and motor locations. Multi-voxel pattern analysis of concurrently recorded fMRI signals revealed that tactile location was coded anatomically in anterior PPC but spatially in posterior PPC during sensory processing. After movement instructions were specified, PPC exclusively represented the movement goal in space, in regions associated with visuo-motor planning and with regional overlap for sensory, rule-related, and movement coding. Thus, PPC flexibly updates its spatial codes to accommodate rule-based transformation of sensory input to generate movement to environment and own body alike.
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