Study shows where brain transforms seeing into doing

Thursday, July 5, 2018 - 18:00 in Psychology & Sociology

You see the flour in the pantry, so you reach for it. You see the traffic light change to green, so you step on the gas. While the link between seeing and then moving in response is simple and essential to everyday existence, neuroscientists haven’t been able to get beyond debating where the link is and how it’s made. But in a new study in Nature Communications, a team from MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory provides evidence that one crucial brain region called the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) plays an important role in converting vision into action. “Vision in the service of action begins with the eyes, but then that information has to be transformed into motor commands,” says senior author Mriganka Sur, the Paul E. and Lilah Newton Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “This is the place where that planning begins.” Sur says...

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