The macaque ventral intraparietal area has expanded into three homologue human parietal areas. (February 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Foster, Celia; Sheng, Wei-An; Heed, Tobias; Ben Hamed, Suliann
• Is Part Of: Progress in neurobiology. Volume 209(2022)
• Publication Date: 2022-02
• Subjects: Posterior parietal cortex -- Human -- Macaque -- Functional homology -- Intraparietal area -- VIP -- Cross-species -- Cortical expansion; Neurobiology -- Periodicals; Neurology -- Periodicals; Neurology -- Periodicals; Neurobiologie -- Périodiques; 612.8
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pneurobio.2021.102185
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0301-0082

Abstract

Highlights: We present a comprehensive review of the literature about the macaque and human ventral intraparietal area (VIP). Human studies have located the analogue of macaque VIP in three distinct clusters. We propose that the macaque region has expanded into three dedicated regions in humans. The human VIP regions process the head/self in the environment, visual heading direction, and head peripersonal space. The overall function of these regions may be prediction in time and space, a feature critical for state estimation. Abstract: The macaque ventral intraparietal area (VIP) in the fundus of the intraparietal sulcus has been implicated in a diverse range of sensorimotor and cognitive functions such as motion processing, multisensory integration, processing of head peripersonal space, defensive behavior, and numerosity coding. Here, we exhaustively review macaque VIP function, cytoarchitectonics, and anatomical connectivity and integrate it with human studies that have attempted to identify a potential human VIP homologue. We show that human VIP research has consistently identified three, rather than one, bilateral parietal areas that each appear to subsume some, but not all, of the macaque area's functionality. Available evidence suggests that this human "VIP complex" has evolved as an expansion of the macaque area, but that some precursory specialization within macaque VIP has been previously overlooked. The three human areas are dominated, roughly, by coding the head or self in the environment, visual heading direction, and the peripersonal environment around the head, respectively. A unifying functional principle may be best described as prediction in space and time, linking VIP to state estimation as a key parietal sensorimotor function. VIP's expansive differentiation of head and self-related processing may have been key in the emergence of human bodily self-consciousness.