Abstract
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.
Highlights
A fundamental organizing principle of sensory cortex is the topographic mapping of stimulus dimensions (Kaas, 1997; Mountcastle, 1957)
We focus on characterizing the organization and retinotopic properties of putative visual field maps in frontoparietal cortex
The task was designed to tax attentional resources presumably controlled by activity in topographic maps in frontoparietal cortex (Figure 1A)
Summary
A fundamental organizing principle of sensory cortex is the topographic mapping of stimulus dimensions (Kaas, 1997; Mountcastle, 1957). Multiple visual field maps are arranged in clusters, in which several adjacent maps share a common eccentricity representation (Kolster et al, 2009; Wandell et al, 2005; Wandell et al, 2007). These clusters are thought to form larger, more efficient processing units by sharing computational resources and minimizing the length of axons connecting the portions of the maps with similar spatial receptive fields (Wandell et al, 2005). More than twenty visual field maps have been identified in the human brain, several of which are organized into clusters (Arcaro and Kastner, 2015; Larsson and Heeger, 2006; Wandell et al, 2005; Wandell et al, 2007; Wandell and Winawer, 2011; Wang et al, 2015)
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