Spatiotemporal dynamics of the functional architecture for gain fields in inferior parietal lobule of behaving monkey.

Intrinsic optical imaging has revealed a representation of eye position smoothly mapped across the surface of the inferior parietal lobule in behaving monkeys. We demonstrate here that blood vessels imaged along with the cortex have large signals tuned sometimes, but not always, to match the surrounding tissue. The relationship between the vessels and surrounding tissue in both space and time was explored using independent component analysis (ICA). Working only with single-trial data, ICA discovered a sequence of regions corresponding to the vascular propagation of activated signals from remote loci into the blood vessels. The vascular signals form a novel map of cortical function--the functional angioarchitecture--superimposed upon the cortical functional architecture. Furthermore, the incorporation of temporal aspects in optical data permitted the tuning of the inferior parietal lobule to be tracked in time through the task, demonstrating the expression of unusual tuning properties that might be exploited for higher cognitive functions.