Visitors Talk: Roberto Caminiti, Sapienza University Rome

Abstract

Classical neurophysiology suggests that the motor cortex (MI) has an exclusive and unique role in action control. In contrast, there is evidence for multiple parieto-frontal spinal action command modules that can bypass MI. Five observations support this modular perspective: (i) the statistics of cortical connectivity demonstrates functionally-related clusters of cortical areas, defining functional modules in the frontal, cingulate, and parietal cortices; (ii) different corticospinal pathways originate from the above areas, each with a distinct range of axon diameters, hence of conduction velocities; (iii) the activation time of each module varies depending on the task, and different modules can be activated simultaneously; (iv) a modular architecture with direct motor output is faster and less metabolically expensive than an architecture that relies on MI, given the slow connections between MI and other cortical areas; (v) lesions of the areas composing parieto-frontal modules have different effects from lesions of MI. Examples of cortico-spinal modules and functions they subserve are: module 1) arm reaching, tool use and object construction; module 2) spatial navigation and locomotion; module 3) grasping and observation of hand and mouth actions; module 4) action initiation, motor sequences, time encoding; module 5) conditional motor association and learning, action plan switching and action inhibition; module 6) defensive actions. Under this perspective, modules create a model o the worlds near an agent and can serve as a library of tools to be recombined when faced with novel tasks, while MI might serve as a combinatory hub for intermodular interactions, thus playing a different and more complex role than classically assigned to it.

About the speaker

Roberto Caminiti received his medical degree from the University of Catania, Italy. He began his research career working at the University of Ancona in Italy and later on at the Lausanne University in Switzerland. In 1980 he received a CNR-NATO fellowship and spent 5 years as a Howell-Cannon foreign scholar in the Vernon Mountcastle lab at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA. In 1985 Dr. Caminiti joined the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy and from 1994 he has been a full Professor of Physiology at the Department of Anatomy, Histology, forensic Medicine and Orthopedics. Over the years, Dr. Caminiti held major academic roles as the Director of the School of Doctorate in Neuroscience and a Chair of the PhD in Neurophysiology at the Sapienza University. Dr. Caminiti’s research focuses on the role of frontal and parietal cortex in alert behaving monkeys with the goal to understand the consequences of parietal and frontal lesions on cognitive functions. He performs multidisciplinary research using a combination of behavioral neurophysiology, anatomical and imaging techniques (DTT) in order to characterize cortical connections in both humans and monkeys.