Neuroscience Forefront ReviewParieto-frontal gradients and domains underlying eye and hand operations in the action space

•Parietal and frontal cortex are organized in gradients of functional properties.•Within parietal and frontal gradients there exist functionally dominant domains.•Eye-hand coordination domains can be found in both frontal and parietal cortices.•Eye-hand coordination domains subserve actions of increasing complexity in evolution.•Functional gradients and domains exist also in prefrontal cortex and hyppocampus.

In monkeys, motor intention in its different forms emerges from a parietal-frontal gradient of visual, eye and hand signals, containing discrete dominant domains. These are formed by areas sharing cortical connections and functional properties. Within this gradient, the combination of different inputs determines the tuning properties of neurons, while local and long cortico-cortical connections shape the structure and temporal delays of the network. The pathways linking similar functional domains in parietal and frontal cortex sculpt information processing systems related to different functions, all requiring eye-hand coordination. fMRI experiments show that similar gradients lay at the core of cognitive-motor control in humans as well. This eye-hand matrix provides a framework to address, within a unitary frame, not only basic forms of motor behavior, such as reaching and grasping, but also actions of increasing complexity, such as interception of moving targets, tool use, construction of complex objects, maze analysis and solution, among others. The organization of the cerebral cortex into functional gradients and domains, beyond frontal and parietal cortices, is common to other brain regions, such as prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, and does not support views of the parieto-frontal operations based on specific and strictly segregated eye and hand modules. These can only be found at the eye and hand motor output domains in the frontal cortex, that is in the frontal eye fields and in the primary motor cortex, respectively.

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