December 2022
Volume 22, Issue 14
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   December 2022
Spatial coding in prefrontal visual responses during a reach task.
Author Affiliations & Notes
  • Veronica Nacher
    York Centre for Vision Research
    Department of Psychology
  • Parisa Abedi-Khoozani
    York Centre for Vision Research
    Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) Program
  • Vishal Bharmauria
    York Centre for Vision Research
    Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) Program
  • Harbandhan Arora
    York Centre for Vision Research
  • Xiaogang Yan
    York Centre for Vision Research
    Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) Program
  • Saihong Sun
    York Centre for Vision Research
    Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) Program
  • Hongying Wang
    York Centre for Vision Research
    Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) Program
  • John Douglas Crawford
    York Centre for Vision Research
    Vision: Science to Applications (VISTA) Program
    Department of Psychology
  • Footnotes
    Acknowledgements  Supported by VISTA (Vision: Science to Applications)
Journal of Vision December 2022, Vol.22, 4451. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.4451
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      Veronica Nacher, Parisa Abedi-Khoozani, Vishal Bharmauria, Harbandhan Arora, Xiaogang Yan, Saihong Sun, Hongying Wang, John Douglas Crawford; Spatial coding in prefrontal visual responses during a reach task.. Journal of Vision 2022;22(14):4451. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.4451.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

Eye-Centered visual codes have been observed throughout the dorsal visual stream and cortical saccade system, but the nature of visual coding in prefrontal cortex is less clear. We examined this question by recording single neurons from dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in two monkeys trained to perform a head-unrestrained reaching paradigm. Animals touched one of three central LEDs at waist level while maintaining gaze on a central fixation dot and were rewarded if they touched a target appearing at one of 15 locations in a 40° x 20° (visual angle) array. Preliminary analysis of 228 neurons in one monkey showed an assortment of target/stimulus, gaze, pre-reach and reach related responses in DLPFC. Most neurons could be described as falling into three main groups: ‘Early” (increased firing rate during the target presentation and gaze onset), “Late” (increased firing rate near the end of the reach), and ‘early-late” responses that spanned both periods. Here, we focused on analysis of the ‘visual’ response of 92 spatially tuned ‘early response’ neurons, 80-180ms after visual target onset. We first tested for gaze, head, and hand gain fields during the different neuronal responses and after removing the gain field effects, we fitted the residual data against various spatial models related with target, eye, head, and arm. We found that the visual response best encoded the target relative to the space (Ts) at the population level with the target relative to the eye (Te) being significantly eliminated. At the single unit level, preferred fits were distributed across all three visual models (Te, Th, Ts) and when other motor models were tested, some ‘visual’ responses actually preferred parameters like future head position. These data suggest that early ‘visual’ responses in DLPFC show complex levels of spatial processing during reaching, perhaps for action planning.

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