Trinity Crapse

Pittsburgh University

“The role of frontal eye field neurons in mediating

visual stability across saccades”

One of the principal ways we investigate the world is by moving our eyes to look at interesting objects in the environment. These eye movements, known as saccades, are extremely fast and quite frequent. While beneficial in extending the range of visual analysis, saccades pose a problem for the brain’s visual system as it performs its analyses. If we perceived the world as actually sensed by the retinas, the world would seem to leap around with each saccade. Clearly, the brain has arrived at a solution to this problem, as we do not perceive the world this way. The question is: how does the brain do it? Here I report a series of experiments that seek to provide further insight into this process. We focused on the frontal eye field (FEF), a visuomotor area that receives corollary discharge about saccades and possesses neurons with shifting receptive fields, two components hypothesized to be critical in a circuit of visual stability.  In behaving monkeys, we recorded from FEF visual and visuomovement neurons while the monkey performed a task that probed a neuron’s capacity to detect changes that occur to a visual scene during a saccade. We found that a population of FEF neurons could tell the difference between visual stimuli that remain stable during a saccade and stimuli that change location during a saccade. These neurons are likely to be a key component of a network that creates a perceptual sense of visual stability from the volatile inputs provided by the eyes.

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