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Evolution of Association Pallial Areas: Parietal Association Areas in Mammals

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Encyclopedia of Neuroscience

Definition

Posterior parietal cortex is a large region of cortex that lies between somatosensory and primary cortices. In some mammals such as primates, it contains a number of cortical fields whose functions include coding the spatial location of objects within both egocentric and extrinsic frames of reference, and in generating an internal representation of the body that contributes to a “sense of self,” “body schema,” or “body image.” While the posterior parietal association areas are well developed in primates, likely in conjunction with specialized hand use, some of these areas may be present in a primitive form in other mammals. A similarly located region of cortex has been identified in rodents, carnivores, hedgehogs, tenrecs, and opossums.

Characteristics

All mammals actively explore their environment with specialized body parts that contain unique arrangements of various types of sensory receptors. It has been proposed that the complex motor sequences involved in exploration...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Neuroscience, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

    Leah Krubitzer & Jeffrey Padberg

  2. Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

    Leah Krubitzer

Authors
  1. Leah Krubitzer
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  2. Jeffrey Padberg
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physiology & Biophysics, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Marc D. Binder

  2. Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy, Graduate School of Medicine University of Tokyo Hongo, Bunkyo‐ku, Tokyo, Japan

    Nobutaka Hirokawa

  3. Göttingen, Germany

    Uwe Windhorst

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag GmbH Berlin Heidelberg

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Krubitzer, L., Padberg, J. (2009). Evolution of Association Pallial Areas: Parietal Association Areas in Mammals. In: Binder, M.D., Hirokawa, N., Windhorst, U. (eds) Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-29678-2_3121

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