Interactions between prefrontal and parietal cortex for the cognitive control of behavior

Abstract

Intelligent behavior depends on the ability to generate flexible, context-specific actions. Of special importance for this capacity are the prefrontal cortex, which provides “executive control” and specifies the context or rules currently in effect, and more posterior areas in the frontal and parietal lobe that guide immediate, specific acts. I will examine how these two systems interact, that is, how contextual information in the frontal lobe shapes activity in sensorimotor areas, through combined neurophysiological experiments in awake behaving monkeys and neural network simulations in robotic models. The experiments use an eye movement task - the “antisaccade/prosaccade” task in which monkeys make a saccade (rapid eye movement) either away from a salient cue, or toward the cue based on an earlier instruction. I will examine the functional interactions among three interconnected areas implicated in this task - the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dPFC), the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), and the frontal eye field (FEF). I have three specific aims: 1) to characterize the propagation and transformation of top-down signals related to task performance through dPFC, LIP and FEF 2) to probe how top-down signals influence visual and motor responses in LIP and FEF and 3) to evaluate possible algorithms for solving this task using computational modeling in robots. Through combined use of neurophysiological experiments and robotic modeling I hope to provide important new insight into the computations behind the antisaccade task and into the cognitive/sensorimotor interface underlying flexible behavior.