From Thought to Action: The Parietal Cortex as a Bridge between Perception, Action, and Cognition

The lateral intraparietal area (LIP) is a subdivision of the inferior parietal lobe that has been implicated in the guidance of spatial attention. In a variety of tasks, LIP provides a “salience representation” of the external world—a topographic visual representation that encodes the locations of salient or behaviorally relevant objects. Recent neurophysiological experiments show that this salience representation incorporates information about multiple behavioral variables—such as a specific motor response, reward, or category membership—associated with the task-relevant object. This integration occurs in a wide variety of tasks, including those requiring eye or limb movements or goal-directed or nontargeting operant responses. Thus, LIP acts as a multifaceted behavioral integrator that binds visuospatial, motor, and cognitive information into a topographically organized signal of behavioral salience. By specifying attentional priority as a synthesis of multiple task demands, LIP operates at the interface of perception, action, and cognition.