Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published July 1999 | public
Journal Article

Responses to Auditory Stimuli in Macaque Lateral Intraparietal Area II. Behavioral Modulation

Abstract

The lateral intraparietal area (LIP), a region of posterior parietal cortex, was once thought to be unresponsive to auditory stimulation. However, recent reports have indicated that neurons in area LIP respond to auditory stimuli during an auditory-saccade task. To what extent are auditory responses in area LIP dependent on the performance of an auditory-saccade task? To address this question, recordings were made from 160 LIP neurons in two monkeys while the animals performed auditory and visual memory-saccade and fixation tasks. Responses to auditory stimuli were significantly stronger during the memory-saccade task than during the fixation task, whereas responses to visual stimuli were not. Moreover, neurons responsive to auditory stimuli tended also to be visually responsive and to exhibit delay or saccade activity in the memory-saccade task. These results indicate that, in general, auditory responses in area LIP are modulated by behavioral context, are associated with visual responses, and are predictive of delay or saccade activity. Responses to auditory stimuli in area LIP may therefore be best interpreted as supramodal responses, and similar in nature to the delay activity, rather than as modality-specific sensory responses. The apparent link between auditory activity and oculomotor behavior suggests that the behavioral modulation of responses to auditory stimuli in area LIP reflects the selection of auditory stimuli as targets for eye movements.

Additional Information

© 1999 The American Physiological Society. Received 14 August 1998; Accepted 17 March 1999; Published online 1 July 1999; Published in print 1 July 1999. The authors thank M. Sahani for data acquisition software and technical assistance, B. Gillikin for technical assistance, C. Reyes for administrative assistance, and Drs. M. Sahani, Y. E. Cohen, and K. V. Shenoy for helpful comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health and by the Boswell Foundation. Support for J. F. Linden was provided by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellowship. Support for A. Grunewald was provided by the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Neuroscience. The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. The article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023