The Compositional Encoding of Hand-Eye Coordinated Movements for Single Neurons in the Posterior Parietal Cortex

Abstract

Human posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is thought to play an important role in hand-eye coordination, yet the underlying encoding mechanisms remain uncertain. We recorded 412 single neurons across 11 sessions from motor cortex (MC; n=251) and PPC (n=161) in a single human participant performing a hand-eye (H-E) coordinated center-out task. While MC neurons showed little to no modulation by eye movements, 79% of PPC neurons had neural representations that were additively separable into independent hand- and eye-movement tuning curves. Due to this separability, neural representations could be separated and additively recomposed while maintaining structure similarity. Consequently, compositional decoders trained solely on single-effector movements could match the performance of decoders trained on coordinated H-E movements (hand: 66% vs 69%; eye: 34% vs 36%). These results show that, during simple center-out tasks, MC hand movement codes are unaffected by eye movements and that compositionality can be used to modularly decode H-E coordinated movements in PPC.