Search research articles

ABOUT JoVE

Overview Leadership Blog JoVE Help Center

AUTHORS

Publishing Process Editorial Board Scope & Policies Peer Review FAQ Submit

LIBRARIANS

Testimonials Subscriptions Access Resources Library Advisory Board FAQ

RESEARCH

JoVE Journal Methods Collections JoVE Encyclopedia of Experiments Archive

EDUCATION

JoVE Core JoVE Business JoVE Science Education JoVE Lab Manual Faculty Resource Center Faculty Site

Terms & Conditions of Use

Related Concept Videos

Somatosensory, Motor, and Association Cortex

Somatosensory, Motor, and Association Cortex

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...

Motor and Sensory Areas of the Cortex

Motor and Sensory Areas of the Cortex

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....

Hierarchy of Motor Control

Hierarchy of Motor Control

The hierarchy of motor control refers to the different levels of organization and processing involved in controlling movement in the body. These levels range from higher cortical areas involved in planning and decision-making to lower spinal cord reflexes that respond automatically to external stimuli.

Somatosensation

Somatosensation

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.

Direct Motor Pathways

Direct Motor Pathways

The direct motor pathways, also known as the pyramidal tracts, are a group of neural pathways that originate in the brain and descend through the spinal cord. They control the voluntary movement of the body. There are two major direct motor pathways: the corticospinal and the corticobulbar tracts.
The corticospinal tract is responsible for the voluntary movement of the limbs and trunk. It originates in the cerebral cortex of the brain and descends through the cerebrum's internal capsule and...

Major Somatic Sensory Pathways

Major Somatic Sensory Pathways

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...

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by

Same author

Functional specialization of the human posterior parietal cortex in visually and proprioceptively driven reaching corrections.

Communications biology·2025

Same author

Role of the Medial Posterior Parietal Cortex in Orchestrating Attention and Reaching.

The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience·2024

Same author

Neurophysiological recordings from parietal areas of macaque brain during an instructed-delay reaching task.

Scientific data·2024

Same author

Motor decoding from the posterior parietal cortex using deep neural networks.

Journal of neural engineering·2023

Same author

A Short Route for Reach Planning between Human V6A and the Motor Cortex.

The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience·2023

Same author

Complementary contribution of the medial and lateral human parietal cortex to grasping: a repetitive TMS study.

Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)·2022

Search research articles

Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 22, 2025

Measuring and Manipulating Functionally Specific Neural Pathways in the Human Motor System with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Measuring and Manipulating Functionally Specific Neural Pathways in the Human Motor System with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Published on: February 23, 2020

Similar neural states, but dissimilar decoding patterns for motor control in parietal cortex.

Francesco Edoardo Vaccari¹, Stefano Diomedi¹, Marina De Vitis¹

¹Department of Biomedical and Neuromotor Sciences, University of Bologna, Italy.

Network Neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)

|July 2, 2024

Summary

Neural states in the fronto-parietal network encode movement information. Different parietal areas (PE, PEc, V6A) show distinct information encoding, crucial for brain-machine interfaces.

Keywords:

Decoding Neural states Parietal cortex Reaching movements Spiking activity

More Related Videos

In Vivo Wireless Optogenetic Control of Skilled Motor Behavior

In Vivo Wireless Optogenetic Control of Skilled Motor Behavior

Published on: November 22, 2021

Design and Use of an Apparatus for Presenting Graspable Objects in 3D Workspace

Design and Use of an Apparatus for Presenting Graspable Objects in 3D Workspace

Published on: August 8, 2019

Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: Jun 22, 2025

Measuring and Manipulating Functionally Specific Neural Pathways in the Human Motor System with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Measuring and Manipulating Functionally Specific Neural Pathways in the Human Motor System with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Published on: February 23, 2020

In Vivo Wireless Optogenetic Control of Skilled Motor Behavior

In Vivo Wireless Optogenetic Control of Skilled Motor Behavior

Published on: November 22, 2021

Design and Use of an Apparatus for Presenting Graspable Objects in 3D Workspace

Design and Use of an Apparatus for Presenting Graspable Objects in 3D Workspace

Published on: August 8, 2019

Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Computational Neuroscience

Background:

The fronto-parietal network is crucial for motor control.
Understanding neural representations of reaching movements is key.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate discrete neural states during reaching movements.
To compare information encoding across posterior parietal areas (PE, PEc, V6A).

Main Methods:

Hidden Markov Model (HMM) applied to spiking activity.
Coupled clustering and decoding approaches.
Comparison with Support Vector Machine and Long-Short Term Memory classifiers.

Main Results:

Identified sequential neural states in PE, PEc, and V6A.
Neural states carried spatiotemporal information for behavior.
PE showed lower decoding accuracy than PEc and V6A.
V6A outperformed PEc in target inference, indicating functional specialization.

Conclusions:

Functional differences exist among posterior parietal areas.
These differences are intrinsic to the encoded neural information.
Selecting appropriate neural signal sources is vital for brain-machine interface applications.