scholarly journals Separate Representations of Target and Timing Cue Locations in the Supplementary Eye Fields

2009 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 448-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Campos ◽  
Boris Breznen ◽  
Richard A. Andersen

When different stimuli indicate where and when to make an eye movement, the brain areas involved in oculomotor control must selectively plan an eye movement to the stimulus that encodes the target position and also encode the information available from the timing cue. This could pose a challenge to the oculomotor system since the representation of the timing stimulus location in one brain area might be interpreted by downstream neurons as a competing motor plan. Evidence from diverse sources has suggested that the supplementary eye fields (SEF) play an important role in behavioral timing, so we recorded single-unit activity from SEF to characterize how target and timing cues are encoded in this region. Two monkeys performed a variant of the memory-guided saccade task, in which a timing stimulus was presented at a randomly chosen eccentric location. Many spatially tuned SEF neurons encoded only the location of the target and not the timing stimulus, whereas several other SEF neurons encoded the location of the timing stimulus and not the target. The SEF population therefore encoded the location of each stimulus with largely distinct neuronal subpopulations. For comparison, we recorded a small population of lateral intraparietal (LIP) neurons in the same task. We found that most LIP neurons that encoded the location of the target also encoded the location of the timing stimulus after its presentation, but selectively encoded the intended eye movement plan in advance of saccade initiation. These results suggest that SEF, by conditionally encoding the location of instructional stimuli depending on their meaning, can help identify which movement plan represented in other oculomotor structures, such as LIP, should be selected for the next eye movement.

2007 ◽  
Vol 98 (6) ◽  
pp. 3163-3170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takuro Ikeda ◽  
Okihide Hikosaka

Expectation of reward is crucial for goal-directed behavior of animals. However, little is known about how reward information is used in the brain at the time of action. We investigated this question by recording from single neurons in the macaque superior colliculus (SC) while the animal was performing a memory-guided saccade task with an asymmetrical reward schedule. The SC is an ideal structure to ask this question because it receives inputs from many brain areas including the prefrontal cortex and the basal ganglia where reward information is thought to be encoded and sends motor commands to the brain stem saccade generators. We found two groups of SC neurons that encoded reward information in the presaccadic period: positive reward-coding neurons that showed higher activity when reward was expected and negative reward-coding neurons that showed higher activity when reward was not expected. The positive reward-coding usually started even before a cue for target position was presented, whereas the negative reward-coding was largely restricted to the presaccadic period. The two kinds of reward-coding may be useful for the animal to select an appropriate behavior in a complex environment.


1889 ◽  
Vol 35 (149) ◽  
pp. 23-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Warner

(1) Movement in mau has long been a subject of profitable study. Visible movement in the body is produced by muscular contraction following upon stimulation of the muscles by efferent currents passing from the central nerve-system. Modern physiological experiments have demonstrated that when a special brain-area discharges nerve-currents, these are followed by certain visible movements or contraction of certain muscles corresponding. So exact are such reactions, as obtained by experiment upon the brain-areas, that movements similar to those produced by experimental excitation of a certain brain-area may be taken as evidence of action in that area, or as commencing in discharge from that area (see Reinforcement of Movements, 35; Compound Series of Movements, 34).


2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (6) ◽  
pp. 2027-2032 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasper H. Fabius ◽  
Alessio Fracasso ◽  
Tanja C. W. Nijboer ◽  
Stefan Van der Stigchel

Humans move their eyes several times per second, yet we perceive the outside world as continuous despite the sudden disruptions created by each eye movement. To date, the mechanism that the brain employs to achieve visual continuity across eye movements remains unclear. While it has been proposed that the oculomotor system quickly updates and informs the visual system about the upcoming eye movement, behavioral studies investigating the time course of this updating suggest the involvement of a slow mechanism, estimated to take more than 500 ms to operate effectively. This is a surprisingly slow estimate, because both the visual system and the oculomotor system process information faster. If spatiotopic updating is indeed this slow, it cannot contribute to perceptual continuity, because it is outside the temporal regime of typical oculomotor behavior. Here, we argue that the behavioral paradigms that have been used previously are suboptimal to measure the speed of spatiotopic updating. In this study, we used a fast gaze-contingent paradigm, using high phi as a continuous stimulus across eye movements. We observed fast spatiotopic updating within 150 ms after stimulus onset. The results suggest the involvement of a fast updating mechanism that predictively influences visual perception after an eye movement. The temporal characteristics of this mechanism are compatible with the rate at which saccadic eye movements are typically observed in natural viewing.


2010 ◽  
Vol 104 (5) ◽  
pp. 2831-2849 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Campos ◽  
Boris Breznen ◽  
Richard A. Andersen

In the study of the neural basis of sensorimotor transformations, it has become clear that the brain does not always wait to sense external events and afterward select the appropriate responses. If there are predictable regularities in the environment, the brain begins to anticipate the timing of instructional cues and the signals to execute a response, revealing an internal representation of the sequential behavioral states of the task being performed. To investigate neural mechanisms that could represent the sequential states of a task, we recorded neural activity from two oculomotor structures implicated in behavioral timing—the supplementary eye fields (SEF) and the lateral intraparietal area (LIP)—while rhesus monkeys performed a memory-guided saccade task. The neurons of the SEF were found to collectively encode the progression of the task with individual neurons predicting and/or detecting states or transitions between states. LIP neurons, while also encoding information about the current temporal interval, were limited with respect to SEF neurons in two ways. First, LIP neurons tended to be active when the monkey was planning a saccade but not in the precue or intertrial intervals, whereas SEF neurons tended to have activity modulation in all intervals. Second, the LIP neurons were more likely to be spatially tuned than SEF neurons. SEF neurons also show anticipatory activity. The state-selective and anticipatory responses of SEF neurons support two complementary models of behavioral timing, state dependent and accumulator models, and suggest that each model describes a contribution SEF makes to timing at different temporal resolutions.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick J. Davis

AbstractThe distance between the surface of the scalp and the surface of the grey matter of the brain is a key factor in determining the effective dose of non-invasive brain stimulation for an individual person. The highly folded nature of the cortical surface means that the depth of a particular brain area is likely to vary between individuals. The question addressed here is: what is the variability of this measure of cortical depth? 94 anatomical MRI images were taken from the OASIS database. For each image, the minimum distance from each point in the grey matter to the scalp surface was determined. Transforming these estimates into standard space meant that the coefficient of variation could be determined across the sample. The results indicated that depth variability is high across the cortical surface, even when taking sulcal depth into account. This was true even for the primary visual and motor areas, which are often used in setting TMS dosage. The correlation of the depth of these areas and the depth of other brain areas was low. The results suggest that dose-setting of TMS based on visual or evoked potentials may offer poor reliability, and that individual brain images should be used when targeting non-primary brain areas.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 626 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Harezlak ◽  
Pawel Kasprowski

Eye movement is one of the biological signals whose exploration may reveal substantial information, enabling greater understanding of the biology of the brain and its mechanisms. In this research, eye movement dynamics were studied in terms of chaotic behavior and self-similarity assessment to provide a description of young, healthy, oculomotor system characteristics. The first of the investigated features is present and advantageous for many biological objects or physiological phenomena, and its vanishing or diminishment may indicate a system pathology. Similarly, exposed self-similarity may prove useful for indicating a young and healthy system characterized by adaptability. For this research, 24 young people with normal vision were involved. Their eye movements were registered with the usage of a head-mounted eye tracker, using infrared oculography, embedded in the sensor, measuring the rotations of the left and the right eye. The influence of the preprocessing step in the form of the application of various filtering methods on the assessment of the final dynamics was also explored. The obtained results confirmed the existence of chaotic behavior in some parts of eye movement signal; however, its strength turned out to be dependent on the filter used. They also exposed the long-range correlation representing self-similarity, although the influence of the applied filters on these outcomes was not unveiled.


1998 ◽  
Vol 79 (6) ◽  
pp. 3197-3215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Quaia ◽  
Lance M. Optican

Quaia, Christian and Lance M. Optican. Commutative saccadic generator is sufficient to control a 3-D ocular plant with pulleys. J. Neurophysiol. 79: 3197–3215, 1998. One-dimensional models of oculomotor control rely on the fact that, when rotations around only one axis are considered, angular velocity is the derivative of orientation. However, when rotations around arbitrary axes [3-dimensional (3-D) rotations] are considered, this property does not hold, because 3-D rotations are noncommutative. The noncommutativity of rotations has prompted a long debate over whether or not the oculomotor system has to account for this property of rotations by employing noncommutative operators. Recently, Raphan presented a model of the ocular plant that incorporates the orbital pulleys discovered, and qualitatively modeled, by Miller and colleagues. Using one simulation, Raphan showed that the pulley model could produce realistic saccades even when the neural controller is commutative. However, no proof was offered that the good behavior of the Raphan-Miller pulley model holds for saccades different from those simulated. We demonstrate mathematically that the Raphan-Miller pulley model always produces movements that have an accurate dynamic behavior. This is possible because, if the pulleys are properly placed, the oculomotor plant (extraocular muscles, orbital pulleys, and eyeball) in a sense appears commutative to the neural controller. We demonstrate this finding by studying the effect that the pulleys have on the different components of the innervation signal provided by the brain to the extraocular muscles. Because the pulleys make the axes of action of the extraocular muscles dependent on eye orientation, the effect of the innervation signals varies correspondingly as a function of eye orientation. In particular, the Pulse of innervation, which in classical models of the saccadic system encoded eye velocity, here encodes a different signal, which is very close to the derivative of eye orientation. In contrast, the Step of innervation always encodes orientation, whether or not the plant contains pulleys. Thus the Step can be produced by simply integrating the Pulse. Particular care will be given to describing how the pulleys can have this differential effect on the Pulse and the Step. We will show that, if orbital pulleys are properly located, the neural control of saccades can be greatly simplified. Furthermore, the neural implementation of Listing's Law is simplified: eye orientation will lie in Listing's Plane as long as the Pulse is generated in that plane. These results also have implications for the surgical treatment of strabismus.


2017 ◽  
Vol 117 (1) ◽  
pp. 376-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mrinmoy Chakrabarty ◽  
Tamami Nakano ◽  
Shigeru Kitazawa

It is generally accepted that the neural circuits that are implicated in saccade control use retinotopically coded target locations. However, several studies have revealed that nonretinotopic representation is also used. This idea raises a question about whether nonretinotopic coding is egocentric (head or body centered) or allocentric (environment centered). In the current study, we hypothesized that allocentric coding may play a crucial role in immediate saccade control. To test this hypothesis, we used an immediate double-step saccade task toward two sequentially flashed targets with a frame in the background, and we examined whether the end point of the second saccade was affected by a transient shift of the background that participants were told to ignore. When the background was shifted transiently upward (or downward) during the flash of the second target, the second saccade generally erred the target downward (or upward), which was in the direction opposite to the shift of the background. The effect on the second saccade became significant within 150 ms after the frame was presented for decoding and was built up for 200 ms thereafter. When the second saccade was not adjusted, a small, corrective saccade followed within 300 ms. The effect scaled linearly with the shift size up to 3° for a noncorrective second saccade and up to 6° for a corrective saccade. The present results show that an allocentric location of a target is rapidly represented by the brain and used for controlling saccades. NEW & NOTEWORTHY We found that the saccade end point was shifted from the actual target position toward the direction expected from allocentric coding when a large frame in the background was transiently shifted during the period of target presentation. The effect occurred within 150 ms. The present study provides direct evidence that the brain rapidly uses allocentric coding of a target to control immediate saccades.


Author(s):  
Armin Schnider

What diseases cause confabulations and which are the brain areas whose damage is responsible? This chapter reviews the causes, both historic and present, of confabulations and deduces the anatomo-clinical relationships for the four forms of confabulation in the following disorders: alcoholic Korsakoff syndrome, traumatic brain injury, rupture of an anterior communicating artery aneurysm, posterior circulation stroke, herpes and limbic encephalitis, hypoxic brain damage, degenerative dementia, tumours, schizophrenia, and syphilis. Overall, clinically relevant confabulation is rare. Some aetiologies have become more important over time, others have virtually disappeared. While confabulations seem to be more frequent after anterior brain damage, only one form has a distinct anatomical basis.


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