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Summary: Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 1997. 20:30330
Copyright c 1997 by Annual Reviews Inc. All rights reserved
MULTIMODAL REPRESENTATION
OF SPACE IN THE POSTERIOR
PARIETAL CORTEX AND ITS USE
IN PLANNING MOVEMENTS
Richard A. Andersen, Lawrence H. Snyder, David C. Bradley,
and Jing Xing
Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125
KEY WORDS: eye movements, navigation, monkey, spatial representation, optic flow
ABSTRACT
Recent experiments are reviewed that indicate that sensory signals from many
modalities, as well as efference copy signals from motor structures, converge in
the posterior parietal cortex in order to code the spatial locations of goals for
movement. These signals are combined using a specific gain mechanism that en-
ables the different coordinate frames of the various input signals to be combined
into common, distributed spatial representations. These distributed representa-
tions can be used to convert the sensory locations of stimuli into the appropriate
motor coordinates required for making directed movements. Within these spa-
tial representations of the posterior parietal cortex are neural activities related to
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