FENS Forum 2010 - Amsterdam
- Posters: to be on display from 8:00 to 13:15 in the morning and from 13:30 to 18:45 in the afternoon.
Poster sessions run from 09:30 to 13:15 in the morning and from 13:30 to 17:30 in the afternoon.
A one hour time block is dedicated to discussion with the authors (authors should be in attendance at
their posters as from the time indicated.)
- For other sessions, time indicates the beginning and end of the sessions.
First author
Reyes-Puerta, Vicente (poster)
Poster board D19 - Sun 04/07/2010, 14:30 - Hall 1
Session 051 - Visuomotor processing
Abstract n° 051.19
Publication ref.: FENS Abstr., vol.5, 051.19, 2010
Authors
Reyes-Puerta V. (1, 2), Philipp R. (1), Lindner W. (1) & Hoffmann K. P. (1, 2)
Addresses
(1) Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology, Bochum, Germany; (2) International Graduate School of
Neuroscience, Bochum, Germany
Title
Neuronal activity in the superior colliculus related to saccade initiation during coordinated gaze-reach
movements
Text
One must be quick and precise when foveating targets to be reached, because the eyes have to
guide the hand trajectory by visual feedback, and we may miss a rapidly moving target if our grasping
is not fast and accurate enough. To this end, our brains developed mechanisms coordinating gaze
and hand movements to optimize the way in which we foveate and reach. One of these mechanisms
is the facilitation of the primary saccade — proven in humans and confirmed here in monkeys —
which allows the generation of faster gaze movements when reaching towards visual targets. Here
we searched for the neural substrates accounting for this facilitation in the Superior Colliculus (SC),
an area classically related to saccade initiation. Upon presentation of a target, neurons located at the
rostral pole of the SC (rSC) started the saccade-related pause in their activity earlier in tasks involving
coordinated gaze-reach movements than in tasks in which the saccades were made in isolation. In
the same tasks neurons located at the caudal SC (cSC) reached peak firing rates faster in
coordinated gaze-reach movements than with isolated saccades, demonstrating the tight coupling
between their burst activity latencies and the saccadic reaction times. Further, the saccade-related
activity of cSC neurons was lower in tasks where the saccades were accompanied by corresponding
reaching movements. In sum, our results extend the role of the SC in saccade initiation to coordinated
gaze-reach movements, identifying its activity as an important part of the distributed neural system for
eye-hand coordination.
Theme
D - Sensory and motor systems
Visuomotor processing
Copyright © 2010 - Federation of European Neurosciences Societies (FENS)