Neuronal basis of goal-directed reach planning under reversed vision in the parietal and premotor cortices

by Shenbing Kuang
Doctoral thesis
Date of Examination:2013-02-19
Date of issue:2013-10-09
Advisor:Prof. Dr. Alexander Gail
Referee:Prof. Dr. Stefan Treue
Referee:Prof. Dr. Fred Wolf
Referee:Prof. Hansjörg Scherberger
Referee:Prof. Dr. Melanie Wilke
Referee:Dr. Igor Kagan
Persistent Address: http://dx.doi.org/10.53846/goediss-4067

 

 

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Abstract

English

In our everyday life we can produce goal-directed movements precisely and effortlessly, for example to saccade towards a location that you are interested in, or to reach and grasp for a cup of coffee. Goal-directed behaviors are essential skills for survival when humans and higher animals interact with the environment. Correspondingly, a fundamental problem in system neuroscience is to determine how and where the central nervous system achieves the planning and control of these voluntary eye and hand movements. The aim of the current thesis was to use the visually-guided hand reaching movement as a model system to probe such sensorimotor functions in the brain, mostly at the levels of single neurons in the primate cerebral cortex.  To this end, I conducted extracellular single unit recordings in awake, behaving monkeys engaged in well controlled reaching tasks, and interpreted these cortical neural activities in relation to monkeys’ behavior. Besides the studies using the method of monkey electrophysiology, I also employed psychophysical and modeling approaches to infer the properties of brain functions on motor planning and motor controls. The advantages of combining these different approaches are that they allowed converging understandings about the cortical sensorimotor functions at various levels, ranging from the theoretical to the behavioral and to the neuronal levels. I will organize the thesis as follows: The first chapter will give a brief general introduction on the field of sensorimotor researches, with a focus on the evidences from the neurophysiologic studies. The second chapter will cover the main research results in the format of prepared manuscripts. This includes three manuscripts, two of which deal with data from the monkey electrophysiology project while the third one is based on data from human psychophysics. In the third chapter I will summarize the main findings and draw conclusions from the current thesis work, and meanwhile offer some outlooks on future studies which are necessary to further substantiate these conclusions.
Keywords: reach planning; reversed vision; parietal reach region; dorsal premotor cortex
 
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