Alteration of the microsaccadic velocity-amplitude main sequence relationship after visual transients: implications for models of saccade control

Buonocore, Antimo; Chen, Chih-Yang; Tian, Xiaoguang; Idrees, Saad; Münch, Thomas A.; Hafed, Ziad M.

doi:10.1152/jn.00811.2016

Cited by 46 publications

(88 citation statements)

References 66 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We used two male monkeys to ensure replicability of results while being constrained by the "3R" (refine, reduce, replace) principles for animal research. Combined with congruence of several key ingredients of our results with several prior studies in monkeys (Krauzlis and Miles, 1996b;Hafed and Ignashchenkova, 2013;Buonocore et al, 2017b) and humans (Schütz et al, 2008;Edelman and Xu, 2009;Buonocore et al, 2016;Braun et al, 2017), we have high confidence that our results from the two monkeys are a general property of the smooth pursuit eye movement system.…”

Section: Experimental Design and Statistical Analysissupporting

confidence: 85%

“…We found a systematic directional influence of such signals, and with latencies of only 50 -80 ms. These results, directly paralleling saccadic ones (Reingold and Stampe, 2002;Buonocore and McIntosh, 2008;Edelman and Xu, 2009;Bompas and Sumner, 2011;Buonocore et al, 2017b), suggest that the concept of open-loop pursuit may be too coarse to accurately describe the mechanisms of smooth pursuit initiation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 81%

“…Such a large number of repetitions made using parametric statistical comparisons in our analyses well justified. For some analyses of catch-up saccades during a "saccadic inhibition" post-flash phase of trials (Reingold and Stampe, 1999, 2000Buonocore and McIntosh, 2008;Hafed and Ignashchenkova, 2013;Buonocore et al, 2017b), there was (by definition of the phenomenon) a relative rarity of saccades to analyze. However, we ensured statistical robustness even for these observations by increasing the number of repetitions per condition that we collected overall (see above) such that there was still statistical confidence in the relatively fewer inhibition-phase saccades that we were analyzing (we show 95% confidence intervals for all of our analyses).…”

Section: Experimental Design and Statistical Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the case of vision and the oculomotor system, such access allows rapid resetting of oculomotor plans to make appropriate orienting reflexes Stampe, 1999, 2002;Buonocore and McIntosh, 2008;Rolfs et al, 2008;Hafed and Ignashchenkova, 2013). This resetting can even alter the kinematics of already-programmed saccades (Edelman and Xu, 2009;Guillaume, 2012;Buonocore et al, 2016Buonocore et al, , 2017b well before most higher-level cortical visual areas finalize processing of the appearing stimuli (Schmolesky et al, 1998). That is, within a mere ϳ50 -100 ms after stimulus onset, a full processing cycle from visual input all the way to eye movement output takes place (Fischer and Boch, 1983;Boch et al, 1984;Fischer and Ramsperger, 1984;Tian et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Eye Position Error Influence over “Open-Loop” Smooth Pursuit Initiation

2019

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The oculomotor system integrates a variety of visual signals into appropriate motor plans, but such integration can have widely varying time scales. For example, smooth pursuit eye movements to follow a moving target are slower and longer lasting than saccadic eye movements and it has been suggested that initiating a smooth pursuit eye movement involves an obligatory "open-loop" interval in which new visual motion signals presumably cannot influence the ensuing motor plan for up to 100 ms after movement initiation. However, this view is contrary to the idea that the oculomotor periphery has privileged access to short-latency visual signals. Here, we show that smooth pursuit initiation is sensitive to visual inputs, even in open-loop intervals. We instructed male rhesus macaque monkeys to initiate saccade-free smooth pursuit eye movements and injected a transient, instantaneous eye position error signal at different times relative to movement initiation. We found robust short-latency modulations in eye velocity and acceleration, starting only ϳ50 ms after transient signal occurrence and even during open-loop pursuit initiation. Critically, the spatial direction of the injected position error signal had predictable effects on smooth pursuit initiation, with forward errors increasing eye acceleration and backward errors reducing it. Catch-up saccade frequencies and amplitudes were also similarly altered ϳ50 ms after transient signals, much like the well known effects on microsaccades during fixation. Our results demonstrate that smooth pursuit initiation is highly sensitive to visual signals and that catch-up saccade generation is reset after a visual transient.Smooth pursuit eye movements allow us to track moving objects. The first ϳ100 ms of smooth pursuit initiation are characterized by smooth eye acceleration and are overwhelmingly described as being "open-loop"; that is, unmodifiable by new visual motion signals. We found that all phases of smooth pursuit, including the so-called open-loop intervals, are reliably modifiable by visual signals. We injected transient flashes resulting in very brief, spatially specific position error signals to smooth pursuit and observed very short-latency changes in smooth eye movements to minimize such errors. Our results highlight the flexibility of the oculomotor system in reacting to environmental events and suggest a functional role for the pervasiveness of visual sensitivity in oculomotor control brain regions.

show abstract

Section: Experimental Design and Statistical Analysissupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Section: Experimental Design and Statistical Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Eye Position Error Influence over “Open-Loop” Smooth Pursuit Initiation

2019

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The animals were trained to maintain precise gaze fixation on a small spot measuring 8.5×8.5 min arc ( 41 ). The same animals were extensively trained on precise fixation and were used in previous studies demonstrating their high oculomotor control capabilities ( 41, 43, 50-52 ). The fixation spot was a white square (72 Cd/m 2 ) presented over a gray background (21 Cd/m 2 ) ( 31, 42 ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The foveal visual representation of the primate superior colliculus

Chen

Hoffmann

Distler

et al. 2019

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

13Processing of foveal retinal input is important not only for high quality visual scene analysis, but 14 also for ensuring precise, albeit tiny, gaze shifts during high acuity visual tasks. The 15 representations of foveal retinal input in primate lateral geniculate nucleus and early visual 16 cortices have been characterized. However, how such representations translate into precise eye 17 movements remains unclear. Here we document functional and structural properties of the foveal 18 visual representation of midbrain superior colliculus. We show that superior colliculus, 19 classically associated with extra-foveal spatial representations needed for gaze shifts, is highly 20 sensitive to visual input impinging on the fovea. Superior colliculus also represents such input in 21 an orderly and very specific manner, and it magnifies representation of foveal images in neural 22 tissue as much as primary visual cortex does. Primate superior colliculus contains a high-fidelity 23 visual representation, with large foveal magnification, perfectly suited for active visuomotor 24 control and perception. 25 26 27 94 Figure 1 Foveal visual neurons of primate superior colliculus (SC). (A) Four example neurons recorded from right 95 SC in awake monkeys. Top: visual response fields (RF's) in polar coordinates (Materials and Methods). Middle: same 96 RF's using log-polar coordinates magnifying small eccentricities (15). Bottom: raw firing rates (blue) along with 97 s.e.m. error bars (dashed blue) when a stimulus was presented near the neuron's RF hotspot (Materials and Methods). 98 Individual rasters show raw spike (action potential) times across repetitions of stimulus presentation. All neurons had 99 RF's almost entirely contained within the rod-sparse foveola region (i.e. <0.5 deg eccentricity; (6-8)). Different 100 neurons tiled different portions of foveal space (top two rows), and all had strong sensitivity. (B) Across both right 101 and left SC's, the entire foveal space was represented. Each small circle indicates RF hotspot location from an example 102 neuron, and solid lines indicate RF inner boundaries. (C) Foveal RF's were much smaller than peripheral ones. Six 103 example neurons with RF boundaries and hotspot locations indicated by outlines and small circles, respectively. Right: 104 log-polar coordinates magnifying the small, but highly well-defined visual RF's of the foveal neurons. Also see Fig. 105 2A. 106 107 Strong visual sensitivity was additionally reflected in neural response latency (29-31): 108first-spike latency (Materials and Methods) was similar to that in peripheral neurons (Fig. S2C). 109 Only in superficial SC layers, response latency decreased with increasing eccentricity within the 110 central 2 deg (Fig. S2C, blue). Because superficial neurons, but not deeper ones, receive direct 111 retinal input (3-5), this non-uniformity could reflect the sparseness of rod photoreceptors (having 112 fast integration times) in foveola. 113 130 microsaccades are needed to re-align gaze (16): tiny microsa...

show abstract

Time-dependent inhibition of covert shifts of attention

2021

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Visual transients can interrupt overt orienting by abolishing the execution of a planned eye movement due about 90 ms later, a phenomenon known as saccadic inhibition (SI). It is not known if the same inhibitory process might influence covert orienting in the absence of saccades, and consequently alter visual perception. In Experiment 1 (n = 14), we measured orientation discrimination during a covert orienting task in which an uninformative exogenous visual cue preceded the onset of an oriented probe by 140–290 ms. In half of the trials, the onset of the probe was accompanied by a brief irrelevant flash, a visual transient that would normally induce SI. We report a time-dependent inhibition of covert orienting in which the irrelevant flash impaired orientation discrimination accuracy when the probe followed the cue by 190 and 240 ms. The interference was more pronounced when the cue was incongruent with the probe location, suggesting an impact on the reorienting component of the attentional shift. In Experiment 2 (n = 12), we tested whether the inhibitory effect of the flash could occur within an earlier time range, or only within the later, reorienting range. We presented probes at congruent cue locations in a time window between 50 and 200 ms. Similar to Experiment 1, discrimination performance was altered at 200 ms after the cue. We suggest that covert attention may be susceptible to similar inhibitory mechanisms that generate SI, especially in later stages of attentional shifting (> 200 ms after a cue), typically associated with reorienting.

show abstract

Alteration of the microsaccadic velocity-amplitude main sequence relationship after visual transients: implications for models of saccade control

Cited by 46 publications

References 66 publications

Eye Position Error Influence over “Open-Loop” Smooth Pursuit Initiation

Eye Position Error Influence over “Open-Loop” Smooth Pursuit Initiation

The foveal visual representation of the primate superior colliculus

Time-dependent inhibition of covert shifts of attention

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About