Representation of object-centered space in the primate frontal lobe

Abstract

Object-centered spatial awareness – awareness of locations of parts relative to an object – plays an important role in perception and action. Indirect evidence from psychological and neuropsychological studies has indicated that this form of spatial awareness may be served by a cortical system in which neurons encode specific object-centered locations. We set out to obtain direct evidence for object-centered spatial selectivity by recording from single neurons in the frontal cortex of monkeys trained to make eye movements to particular locations on reference objects. We found that neurons in the supplementary eye field (SEF) fire differentially as a function of the location on an object to which an eye movement is directed.