Comparison of visual receptive fields in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and ventral intraparietal area in macaques

The concept of receptive field ( RF ) describes the responsiveness of neurons to sensory space. Neurons in the primate association cortices have long been known to be spatially selective but a detailed characterisation and direct comparison of RF s between frontal and parietal association cortices are missing. We sampled the RF s of a large number of neurons from two interconnected areas of the frontal and parietal lobes, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dl PFC ) and ventral intraparietal area ( VIP ), of rhesus monkeys by systematically presenting a moving bar during passive fixation. We found that more than half of neurons in both areas showed spatial selectivity. Single neurons in both areas could be assigned to five classes according to the spatial response patterns: few non‐uniform RF s with multiple discrete response maxima could be dissociated from the vast majority of uniform RF s showing a single maximum; the latter were further classified into full‐field and confined foveal, contralateral and ipsilateral RF s. Neurons in dl PFC showed a preference for the contralateral visual space and collectively encoded the contralateral visual hemi‐field. In contrast, VIP neurons preferred central locations, predominantly covering the foveal visual space. Putative pyramidal cells with broad‐spiking waveforms in PFC had smaller RF s than putative interneurons showing narrow‐spiking waveforms, but distributed similarly across the visual field. In VIP , however, both putative pyramidal cells and interneurons had similar RF s at similar eccentricities. We provide a first, thorough characterisation of visual RF s in two reciprocally connected areas of a fronto‐parietal cortical network.