Evidence Against a Moving Hill in the Superior Colliculus During Saccadic Eye Movements in the Monkey

Saccadic eye movements of different sizes and directions are represented in an orderly topographic map across the intermediate and deep layers of the superior colliculus (SC), where large saccades are encoded caudally and small saccades rostrally. Based on experiments in the cat, it has been suggested that saccades are initiated by a hill of activity at the caudal site appropriate for a particular saccade. As the saccade evolves and the remaining distance to the target, the motor error, decreases, the hill moves rostrally across successive SC sites responsible for saccades of increasingly smaller amplitudes. When the hill reaches the “fixation zone” in the rostral SC, the saccade is terminated. A moving hill of activity has also been posited for the monkey, in which it is supposed to be transported via so-called build-up neurons (BUNs), which have a prelude of activity that culminates in a burst for saccades. However, several studies using a variety of approaches have yet to provide conclusive evidence for or against a moving hill. The moving hill scenario predicts that during a large saccade the burst of a BUN in the rostral SC will be delayed until the motor error remaining in the evolving saccade is equal to the saccadic amplitude for which that BUN discharges best, i.e., its optimal amplitude. Therefore a plot of the burst lead preceding the “optimal” motor error against the time of occurrence of the optimal motor error should have a slope of zero. A slope of −1 indicates no moving hill. For our 20 BUNs, we used three measures of burst timing: the leads to the onset, peak, and center of the burst. The average slopes of these relations were −1.09, −0.79, and −0.58, respectively. For individual BUNs, the slopes of all three relations always differed significantly from zero. Although the peak and center leads fall between −1 and 0, a hill of activity moving rostrally at a rate indicated by either of these slopes would arrive at the fixation zone much too late to terminate the saccade at the appropriate time. Calculating our same three timing measures from averaged data leads us to the same conclusion. Thus our data do not support the moving hill model. However, we argue in the discussion that the constant lead of the burst onset relative to saccade onset (∼27 ms) suggests that the BUNs may help to trigger the saccade.