Abstract:
The functional anatomy of visually guided movement was
investigated in 18 normal subjects performing visuomotor tracking tasks
during positron emission tomography imaging. Tracking a moving target
with the index finger defined a network of focal responses of relative
cerebral blood flow (relCBF) located in the primary motor cortex, dorsal
parietal cortex, precuneate cortex, supplementary motor area (SMA) and
ipsilateral anterior cerebellum relative to visual tracking alone. When
the temporal complexity of the tracking task was altered by introducing
a 'no go' contingency that allowed for greater time for movement
preparation, there was a significant increase of relCBF in the SMA (P
less than 0.0001). When the spatial complexity was augmented by adding a
secondary target that provided directional cues for the primary target,
there were additional significant increases of relCBF in bilateral
dorsal parietal cortex (P less than 0.05) and precuneate cortex (P less
than 0.05). Although the cued 'no go' task was subjectively easier,
relCBF responses were similar to the uncued 'no go' task in motor
areas. Performing the tracking task with different body parts produced
somatotopically distributed responses in only the motor cortex. The
findings are concordant with clinical reports of patients with brain
lesions and physiological evidence that identifies this distributed
network for performing visually guided movement. The results provide
direct human evidence in the normal brain that the supplementary motor
area contributes in part to the sequencing of movements and the medial
and dorsal parietal cortex participates in the integration of spatial
attributes during selection of movements