Coding of smooth eye movements in three-dimensional space by frontal cortex

Kikuro Fukushima (), Takanobu Yamanobe, Yasuhiro Shinmei, Junko Fukushima, Sergei Kurkin and Barry W. Peterson
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Kikuro Fukushima: Hokkaido University School of Medicine
Takanobu Yamanobe: Hokkaido University School of Medicine
Yasuhiro Shinmei: Hokkaido University School of Medicine
Junko Fukushima: Hokkaido University School of Medicine
Sergei Kurkin: Hokkaido University School of Medicine
Barry W. Peterson: Northwestern University Medical School

Nature, 2002, vol. 419, issue 6903, 157-162

Abstract: Abstract Through the development of a high-acuity fovea, primates with frontal eyes have acquired the ability to use binocular eye movements to track small objects moving in space1. The smooth-pursuit system moves both eyes in the same direction to track movement in the frontal plane (frontal pursuit), whereas the vergence system moves left and right eyes in opposite directions to track targets moving towards or away from the observer (vergence tracking). In the cerebral cortex and brainstem, signals related to vergence eye movements—and the retinal disparity and blur signals that elicit them—are coded independently of signals related to frontal pursuit2,3,4,5,6. Here we show that these types of signal are represented in a completely different way in the smooth-pursuit region of the frontal eye fields7,8,9,10,11. Neurons of the frontal eye field modulate strongly during both frontal pursuit and vergence tracking, which results in three-dimensional cartesian representations of eye movements. We propose that the brain creates this distinctly different intermediate representation to allow these neurons to function as part of a system that enables primates to track and manipulate objects moving in three-dimensional space.

Date: 2002
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DOI: 10.1038/nature00953

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