Object-centered spatial awareness - awareness of locations of parts re
lative to an object - plays an important role in perception and action
. Indirect evidence from psychological and neuropsychological studies
has indicated that this form of spatial awareness may be served by a c
ortical system in which neurons encode specific object-centered locati
ons. We set out to obtain direct evidence for object-centered spatial
selectivity by recording from single neurons in the frontal cortex of
monkeys trained to make eye movements to particular locations on refer
ence objects. We found that neurons in the supplementary eye field (SE
F) fire differentially as a function of the location on an object to w
hich an eye movement is directed.