Shared right-hemispheric representations of sensorimotor goals in dynamic task environments

Functional behaviour affords that we form goals to integrate sensory information about the world around us with suitable motor actions, such as when we plan to grab an object with a hand. However, much research has tested grasping in static scenarios where goals are pursued with repetitive movements, whereas dynamic contexts require goals to be pursued even when changes in the environment require a change in the actions to attain them. To study grasp goals in dynamic environments here, we employed a task where the goal remained the same but the execution of the movement changed; we primed participants to grasp objects either with their right or left hand, and occasionally they had to switch to grasping with both. Switch costs should be minimal if grasp goal representations were used continuously, for example, within the left dominant hemisphere. But remapped or re-computed goal representations should delay movements. We found that switching from right-hand grasping to bimanual grasping delayed reaction times but switching from left-hand grasping to bimanual grasping did not. Further, control experiments showed that the lateralized switch costs were not caused by asymmetric inhibition between hemispheres or switches between usual and unusual tasks. Our results show that the left hemisphere does not serve a general role of sensorimotor grasp goal representation. Instead, sensorimotor grasp goals appear to be represented at intermediate levels of abstraction, downstream from cognitive task representations, yet upstream from the control of the grasping effectors.

Press to grasp: how action dynamics shape object categorization

Action and object are deeply linked to each other. Not only can viewing an object influence an ongoing action, but motor representations of action can also influence visual categorization of objects. It is tempting to assume that this influence is effector-specific. However, there is indirect evidence suggesting that this influence may be related to the action goal and not just to the effector involved in achieving it. This paper aimed, for the first time, to tackle this issue directly. Participants were asked to categorize different objects in terms of the effector (e.g. hand or foot) typically used to act upon them. The task was delivered before and after a training session in which participants were instructed either just to press a pedal with their foot or to perform the same foot action with the goal of guiding an avatar's hand to grasp a small ball. Results showed that pressing a pedal to grasp a ball influenced how participants correctly identified graspable objects as hand-related ones, making their responses more uncertain than before the training. Just pressing a pedal did not have any similar effect. This is evidence that the influence of action on object categorization can be goal-related rather than effector-specific.

Integrative hippocampal and decision-making neurocircuitry during goal-relevant predictions and encoding

It has become clear that the hippocampus plays a critical role in the identification of new contexts and for the detection of changes in familiar contexts. The hippocampus accomplishes these goals through a continual process of comparing predicted features of a context or situation to those actually experienced. A mismatch between expected and experienced context expectations is thought to lead to the generation of a context prediction error (Mizumori, 2013) that functionally alerts connected brain areas to alter subsequent decision making and response selection. Little is understood about how hippocampal context analyses impact downstream decision processes. This issue is evaluated here first by comparing the nature of the information represented in hippocampus and decision-related midbrain-striatal structures, while rats perform a hippocampal-dependent spatial memory task in which rewards of different value are found at different locations. In contrast to place-specific and egocentric neural representations, neural representations of goal information are broadly distributed in hippocampal and decision neural circuitry, but they appear in different forms for different brain structures. It is suggested that further researching on how goal information processing occurs in hippocampus and decision neural circuitry may reveal insights into the nature of the interaction between memory and decision systems. The second part of this review describes neural pathways by which hippocampal context information might arrive within the decision circuit. The third section presents a hypothesis that the nature of the interactions between hippocampal and midbrain-striatal circuitry is regulated by the prefrontal cortex.