Distributed motor processing in cerebral cortex.

Responding to a visual cue requires processing throughout many areas in the brain. The anatomical pathways connecting these diffuse areas are numerous. One way to study the cognitive processing associated with volitional movement is to identify common physiological properties in each area. Recently, the discovery that neuronal activity is broadly tuned in many of these cortical areas has led to new insights into the physiological structure of the process underlying cognition in this distributed system.