Neural Interactions Underlying Visuomotor Associations in the Human Brain

TitleNeural Interactions Underlying Visuomotor Associations in the Human Brain
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2018
AuthorsMadhavan, R, Bansal, AK, Madsen, J, Golby, AJ, Tierney, TS, Eskandar, E, Anderson, WS, Kreiman, G
JournalCerebral Cortex
Date Published12/2018
Keywordsfrontal cortex, human neurophysiology, reinforcement learning, visual cortex

Rapid andflexible learning during behavioral choices is critical to our daily endeavors and constitutes a hallmark ofdynamic reasoning. An important paradigm to examineflexible behavior involves learning new arbitrary associationsmapping visual inputs to motor outputs. We conjectured that visuomotor rules are instantiated by translating visual signalsinto actions through dynamic interactions between visual, frontal and motor cortex. We evaluated the neuralrepresentation of such visuomotor rules by performing intracranialfield potential recordings in epilepsy subjects during arule-learning delayed match-to-behavior task. Learning new visuomotor mappings led to the emergence of specificresponses associating visual signals with motor outputs in 3 anatomical clusters in frontal, anteroventral temporal andposterior parietal cortex. After learning, mapping selective signals during the delay period showed interactions with visualand motor signals. These observations provide initial steps towards elucidating the dynamic circuits underlyingflexiblebehavior and how communication between subregions of frontal, temporal, and parietal cortex leads to rapid learning oftask-relevant choices.


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