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Neurobiology

See and grasp

Nature volume 395, pages 444–445 (1998)Cite this article

To be able to grasp and manipulate objects, we need to know not only their location, but also their shape, orientation and size. Visual information about such properties determines the anticipatory posture of the hand and fingers during reaching, and is critical for controlling skilled actions such as precision grip1. But the neural representations of shapes may be different from the representations that mediate the visual control of action. For example, although object recognition relies on representations that do not vary with changes in orientation, location and size, to act on these objects we probably need representations that are sensitive to just such changes.

Previous studies6,7 showed that neurons in the parietal lobe of monkeys are sensitive to shape. Monkeys were trained to reach and grasp real, three-dimensional objects, either immediately after the object was presented or after a delay period of several seconds during which the object could not be seen. Posterior parietal neurons were found to be selective to both the visual appearance of simple, geometrical solids, and the monkey's short-term memory of them. Moreover, most of these cells showed shape-selective activity, even when the monkey was required to refrain from grasping the object. Nonetheless, in all of these experiments the monkeys were trained to manipulate the test objects and, presumably, had developed the representations required for their hand manipulation through both visual and somatosensory information.

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Figure 1: Lateral view of the macaque brain.

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  1. the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Spemannstrasse 38, D-72076, T¨bingen, Germany

    Nikos K. Logothetis

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  1. Nikos K. Logothetis
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Logothetis, N. See and grasp. Nature 395, 444–445 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/26634

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