The lateral intraparietal area preferentially supports stimulus selection in directed tasks compared to undirected free behavior

Our reactions to the sensory world depend on context. For instance, explicit directions to search for a particular object or feature will induce a different treatment of the sensory world than exploration without a fixed goal. To understand how we navigate the sensory world, it is necessary to understand how both directed search and undirected exploration are produced by the brain. The lateral intraparietal area (LIP) in the posterior parietal cortex has an established role in visual stimulus selection. However, most studies of LIPs role in stimulus selection focus primarily on highly trained, directed tasks, in which animals are given explicit cues as to which stimulus they should select. Here, we compare neural activity in LIP across two tasks. In one task, the animal is given an explicit direction to select one of two natural images from an array; in the other, the animal is allowed to choose an image freely based on their innate preferences. We find that LIP reliably encodes the eye movement prior to its execution only in the directed task, while the eye movement encoding in the undirected task emerges significantly later. Further, LIPs encoding of the images behavioral relevance emerges after the decision in both tasks. These results indicate that LIP preferentially supports stimulus selection in highly trained and directed behaviors, as opposed to free behavior.