Neural Control of Eye Movements

Abstract

Understanding how events in the external world guide actions provides a fruitful and important domain for engineers and biologists to interact Visuomotor control of eye movements provides an elegant model system to investigate mechanisms of selection and control. This paper describes the work that has focused on the neural processes that select the target for an eye movement and the neural processes that regulate the production of eye movements. Current evidence indicates that salient visual targets are located through a temporal evolution of a selection process in which the responses to nontarget stimuli are suppressed, leaving the activation representing the target maximal. Once achieved, the selection of the target leads to stochastic growth of movement-related activity towards a fixed threshold to generate the gaze shift. The signals and processes that have been observed in areas of cerebral cortex of behaving monkeys may motivate biologically inspired solutions to some engineering problems in robotics.

Indexing terms:

• Saccade
• Visual search
• Frontal eye field
• Attention
• Selection
• Reaction time

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aditya Murthy

Aditya Murthy is currently Research Scientist at the National Brain Research Centre, Manesar, where he studies how vision and cognition guide action using eye movements as a model system. His graduate training was with Dr Allen Humphrey in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh where he examined the neural mechanisms involved in the processing of motion by the visual system. For his postdoctoral training he worked with Dr Jeffrey Schall at Vanderbilt University studying the primate visuomotor system to more directly relate neural activity to psychological functions and behaviour. Neural activity recorded from non-human primates during cognitively demanding behaviours have led to a deeper understanding of the neural mechanisms that select stimuli for action and control movement production. He believes this approach will provide answers to many questions that are central to cognitive neuroscience.