The parietal reach region (PRR) is a region within the

posterior parietal cortex The posterior parietal cortex (the portion of parietal neocortex posterior to the primary somatosensory cortex) plays an important role in planned movements, spatial reasoning, and attention. Damage to the posterior parietal cortex can produce a ...

of the macaque brain that is stimulated through reaching for an object. The PRR was initially proposed by

Andersen Andersen () is a Danish-Norwegian patronymic surname meaning "son of Anders" (itself derived from the Greek name " Ανδρέας/Andreas", cf. English Andrew). It is the fifth most common surname in Denmark, shared by about 3.2% of the population. ...

and Buneo, but they just generally explored the idea as postural modulations. Dr. Steven Chang went further in depth by showing the receptive fields of PRR neurons are multiplicatively stimulated through the combination of initial gaze position and initial hand position. This multiplicative stimulation is known as

gain-field encoding Gain field encoding is a hypothesis about the internal storage and processing of limb motion in the brain. In the motor areas of the brain, there are neurons which collectively have the ability to store information regarding both limb positioning ...

. The parietal reach region uses gain-field encoding to calculate the amount of hand displacement needed to reach for an object. A recent study shows that neurons in PRR encodes not only the planned physical movement, but also the anticipated visual sensory consequence of the intended movement once the action is unfolded in time.

References

Cerebral cortex Parietal lobe {{neuroanatomy-stub