Posterior Parietal Cortex Plays a Causal Role in Abstract Memory-Based Visual Categorical Decisions

Neural activity in the lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP) correlates with both sensory evaluation and motor planning underlying visuomotor decisions. We previously showed that LIP plays a causal role in visually-based perceptual and categorical decisions, and preferentially contributes to evaluating sensory stimuli over motor planning. In that study, however, monkeys reported their decisions with a saccade to a colored target associated with the correct motion category or direction. Since LIP is known to play a role in saccade planning, it remains unclear whether LIP’s causal role in such decisions extend to decision-making tasks which do not involve saccades. Here, we employed reversible pharmacological inactivation of LIP neural activity while two male monkeys performed delayed match to category (DMC) and delayed match to sample (DMS) tasks. In both tasks, monkeys needed to maintain gaze fixation throughout the trial and report whether a test stimulus was a categorical match or nonmatch to the previous sample stimulus by releasing a touch bar. LIP inactivation impaired monkeys’ behavioral performance in both tasks, with deficits in both accuracy and reaction time (RT). Furthermore, we recorded LIP neural activity in the DMC task targeting the same cortical locations as in the inactivation experiments. We found significant neural encoding of the sample category, which was correlated with monkeys’ categorical decisions in the DMC task. Taken together, our results demonstrate that LIP plays a generalized role in visual categorical decisions independent of the task-structure and motor response modality.