Mackey Wayne E, Winawer Jonathan, Curtis Clayton E
Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, United States.
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, United States.
Elife. 2017 Jun 19;6:e22974. doi: 10.7554/eLife.22974.
The visual neurosciences have made enormous progress in recent decades, in part because of the ability to drive visual areas by their sensory inputs, allowing researchers to define visual areas reliably across individuals and across species. Similar strategies for parcellating higher-order cortex have proven elusive. Here, using a novel experimental task and nonlinear population receptive field modeling, we map and characterize the topographic organization of several regions in human frontoparietal cortex. We discover representations of both polar angle and eccentricity that are organized into clusters, similar to visual cortex, where multiple gradients of polar angle of the contralateral visual field share a confluent fovea. This is striking because neural activity in frontoparietal cortex is believed to reflect higher-order cognitive functions rather than external sensory processing. Perhaps the spatial topography in frontoparietal cortex parallels the retinotopic organization of sensory cortex to enable an efficient interface between perception and higher-order cognitive processes. Critically, these visual maps constitute well-defined anatomical units that future studies of frontoparietal cortex can reliably target.
近几十年来，视觉神经科学取得了巨大进展，部分原因在于能够通过感觉输入驱动视觉区域，这使得研究人员能够在个体间和物种间可靠地定义视觉区域。然而，用于划分高阶皮层的类似策略却难以实现。在这里，我们使用一种新颖的实验任务和非线性群体感受野建模，绘制并描述了人类额顶叶皮层中几个区域的拓扑组织。我们发现了极角和偏心率的表征，它们被组织成簇，类似于视觉皮层，对侧视野的多个极角梯度共享一个汇合的中央凹。这一点很引人注目，因为额顶叶皮层中的神经活动被认为反映的是高阶认知功能，而非外部感觉处理。也许额顶叶皮层中的空间拓扑结构与感觉皮层的视网膜拓扑组织相似，以便在感知和高阶认知过程之间实现高效的接口。至关重要的是，这些视觉图谱构成了明确的解剖学单元，未来对额顶叶皮层的研究可以可靠地针对这些单元。
