Space Coding in Inferior Premotor Cortex (Area F4): Facts and Speculations

Area F4 is a premotor area which occupies the caudal part of inferior area 6 [see 32]. It’s location is shown in Fig. 1. F4 controls head, face, and arm movements. As shown by Rizzolatti and coworkers, in this area most neurons are bimodal. They have tactile RFs, and corresponding visual RFs extending outward from the tactile fields into the space around the body [20, 22, 37, 38]. The visual field location is independent of eye position and does not change with gaze shifts [22]. Recently, by using a new behavioral paradigm in which during a fixation task monkeys were presented with moving stimuli driven by a robot arm, we studied quantitatively the type of space coding of F4 visual RFs, showing that most of them use a somatocentered frame of reference [16]. Some of these data will be briefly summarized here. New data on the somatosensory, visual and motor properties of F4 neurons will be also presented. The functional properties of F4 neurons and their possible role in coding of space and in motor control will be discussed.

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