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

Kikuro Fukushima, Takanobu Yamanobe, Yasuhiro Shinmei, Junko Fukushima, Sergei Kurkin, Barry W. Peterson

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

94 Scopus citations

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 pursuit2-6. Here we show that these types of signal are represented in a completely different way in the smooth-pursuit region of the frontal eye fields7-11. 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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)157-162
Number of pages6
JournalNature
Volume419
Issue number6903
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 12 2002
Externally publishedYes

Funding

We thank B. Cumming, M. Goldberg, S. Lisberger, F. Miles and P. Strick for comments on the manuscript, and T. Akao and F. Sato for participation in some experiments. This work was supported in part by CRESTof JST, Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports, and Marna Cosmetics. I thank all seagoing staff of the Biological Oceanography Section at Bedford Institute of Oceanography for collecting samples. I am grateful to C. Reynolds, G. Harrison, T. Platt and P. Falkowski for reading the manuscript. I also thank A. Belgrano for sharing his knowledge and pre-publication work on allometry with me. Financial support was provided by DFO Strategic Science Fund in the Ocean Climate Program, and the Interdepartmental Panel on Energy R&D.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General

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