The Cortical Timeline for Deciding on Reach Motor Goals

Flexible sensorimotor planning is the basis for goal-directed behavior. We investigated the integration of visuospatial information with context-specific transformation rules during reach planning. We were especially interested in the relative timing of motor-goal decisions in monkey dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) and parietal reach region (PRR). We used a rule-based mapping task with different cueing conditions to compare task-dependent motor-goal latencies. The task allowed us a separation of cue-related from motor-related activity, and a separation of activity related to motor planning from activity related to motor initiation or execution. The results show that selectivity for the visuospatial goal of a pending movement occurred earlier in PMd than PRR whenever the task required spatial remapping. Such remapping was needed if the spatial representation of a cue or of a default motor plan had to be transformed into a spatially incongruent representation of the motor goal. In contrast, we did not find frontoparietal latency differences if the spatial representation of the cue or the default plan was spatially congruent with the motor goal. The fact that frontoparietal latency differences occurred only in conditions with spatial remapping was independent of the subjects' partial a priori knowledge about the pending goal. Importantly, frontoparietal latency differences existed for motor-goal representations during movement planning, without immediate motor execution. We interpret our findings as being in support of the hypothesis that latency differences reflect a dynamic reorganization of network activity in PRR, and suggest that the reorganization is contingent on frontoparietal projections from PMd.