Visuomotor control in the healthy and damaged brain

For a normally sighted person, nearly all aspects of everyday life involve visually-guided behaviour. Reaching out, grasping, and manipulating objects may seem like simple tasks, yet they require complex processing from a large network of brain regions. In the last two decades there has been an increased focus on the control of visually-guided action in Psychology and Neuroscience and a variety of innovative methods have been developed to investigate the neural basis of ‘realistic’ visuomotor behaviour in the human brain. In this chapter, we will provide an overview of what is currently known about the cortical areas implicated in the visuomotor control of hand movements (reaching, grasping), considering evidence from neuroscientific studies in humans and macaques and neuropsychological studies of people who have sustained brain damage.