Citation

Monteon JA, Wang H, Martinez-Trujillo J, Crawford JD. Eur. J. Neurosci. 2013; 37(11): 1754-1765.

Affiliation

Centre for Vision Research, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada; Canadian Action and Perception Network, Toronto, ON, Canada; Department of Biology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, Federation of European Neuroscience Societies, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/ejn.12175

PMID

23489744

Abstract

The frontal eye field (FEF), in the prefrontal cortex, participates in the transformation of visual signals into saccade motor commands and in eye-head gaze control. The FEF is thought to show eye-fixed visual codes in head-restrained monkeys, but it is not known how it transforms these inputs into spatial codes for head-unrestrained gaze commands. Here, we tested if the FEF influences desired gaze commands within a simple eye-fixed frame, like the superior colliculus (SC), or in more complex egocentric frames like the supplementary eye fields (SEFs). We electrically stimulated 95 FEF sites in two head-unrestrained monkeys to evoke 3D eye-head gaze shifts and then mathematically rotated these trajectories into various reference frames. In theory, each stimulation site should specify a specific spatial goal when the evoked gaze shifts are plotted in the appropriate frame. We found that these motor output frames varied site by site, mainly within the eye-to-head frame continuum. Thus, consistent with the intermediate placement of the FEF within the high-level circuits for gaze control, its stimulation-evoked output showed an intermediate trend between the multiple reference frame codes observed in SEF-evoked gaze shifts and the simpler eye-fixed reference frame observed in SC-evoked movements. These results suggest that, although the SC, FEF and SEF carry eye-fixed information at the level of their unit response fields, this information is transformed differently in their output projections to the eye and head controllers.

Language: en