Pierre Baraduc

Abstract Humans primarily rely on vision to explore and guide actions in spatial environments. The parietal cortex is thought to withhold a unified representation of the visual space allowing to direct saccades to salient cues, while the hippocampus provides a memory-based cognitive place map of the environment. Understanding how these two representations interact during navigation is a key question.

Direct access to motor cortical information now enables tetraplegic patients to precisely control neuroprostheses and recover some autonomy. In contrast, explicit access to higher cortical cognitive functions, such as covert attention, has been missing. Indeed, this cognitive information, known only to the subject, can solely be inferred by an observer from the subject’s overt behavior.