Our paper on Effector-selective modulation of the effective connectivity within frontoparietal circuits during visuomotor tasks is now out on Cerebral cortex!
In this new paper, we draw a thorough picture of the large-scale functional organization of the posterior parietal cortex to disentangle the fronto-parietal networks mediating visuomotor functions. We describe a functional distinction between a more lateral region in the posterior intraparietal sulcus (lpIPS), preferring saccades over pointing and coupled with the frontal eye fields (FEF) at rest, and a more medial portion (mpIPS) intrinsically correlated to the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd). Dynamic causal modeling revealed feedforward-feedback loops linking lpIPS with FEF during saccades and mpIPS with PMd during pointing, with substantial differences between hand and foot. Despite an intrinsic specialization of the action-specific fronto- parietal networks, our study reveals that their functioning is finely regulated according to the effector to be used, being the dynamic interactions within those networks differently modulated when carrying out a similar movement (i.e. pointing) but with distinct effectors (i.e. hand and foot).