The role of the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex in the neural routes to action

Abstract

Neural substrates of action to the object or this specific direct route, however, remain unclear, especially for the connection from the visual pathway to the motor cortex. The study examined this issue by conducting an fMRI experiment, in which two action generation tasks involving pictures of real objects (PA) and the object’s nouns (NA) were used, with pictures naming (PN) and covert noun reading (NR) being the control tasks. The result showed that the model predefined for the PCC and precuneus connecting IPL to the posterior-medial frontal cortex dominated over the others (with 0.45 probability), suggesting that the PCC and the precuneus locate at the neural substrates of action to the object. Furthermore, a feasibility study suggests that the neural pathway composed of the V3/MT, precuneus, PCC, and PM (premotor cortex) forms the direct route from perception to action, which also links to the dorsal pathway so that the perception of objects bypasses the semantic ventral pathway and then directly cues actions via the affordance.