The Parietal Cortex in Sensemaking: The Dissociation of Multiple Types of Spatial Information

Figure 2

A schematic depiction of the metric estimates in the PC module. A common hidden layer takes inputs from both visual field and visual working memory, and outputs a magnitude value as the “PC value”. There are two basic metrics being encoded on the hidden layer: numerosity (in red area, including the number of group attacks and the walking distance on a road segment) and size (in green area, including the radius of group attacks and the flying distance between the group center and POI). The overlap of red and green areas represents the possible overlapped functionality of numerosity and size. The role of PFCcPC (PFC controls PC) is to provide an “attentional prioritization” by enhancing the contrast and specialization on the hidden layer. At any time, only one of the units on PFCcPC is active and projected onto the corresponding section on the Hidden layer. As a result, that section is more active than other sections and more likely to win the competition.