Neuronal activity related to head and eye movements in cat superior colliculus.

Abstract

SUMMARY1. Movement-related discharges were recorded from single cells in the superior colliculus of alert cats while they made eye saccades (with head fixed) or gaze saccades (with head free).2. Visual and auditory stimuli were used as saccade targets. In addition, saccades were made to the remembered location of targets and spontaneously, in the absence of targets, during intertrial intervals.3. When the head was still and the cat performed either spontaneous saccades or saccades to remembered targets, only one class of tectal neurone, the saccade-related burst neurone, inevitably discharged prior to all saccades of appropriate amplitude and direction.4. Neurones with longer lead times and less intense presaccadic discharges were obligately linked only to visually elicited saccades. The discharge of some of these long-lead neurones was also influenced by the spatial position of the visual target (that is, by craniotopic motor error), while that of the saccade-related burst neurones was a function of retinocentric motor error.5. Most neurones which discharged before head movements also discharged before eye movements and had large, contralateral movement fields.

Neural network simulations of the primate oculomotor system III. An one-dimensional, one-directional model of the superior colliculus

“…B Dierence between the pre-and postlesional size of saccades as a function of the distance between the activated Qv and the lesioned TLLB unit. Negative size indicates hypometric postlesional saccades, while negative distance indicates that the Qv unit is rostral to (has a smaller index number than) the TLLB unit account for the fact that tectal presaccadic cells which burst before saccades in one direction are inhibited during saccades in the opposite direction (Infante and Leiva 1986;Peck 1990). Similarly, the herein proposed model does not employ a well-known projection to the SC that originates in the zona incerta.…”

Commissural Excitation and Inhibition by the Superior Colliculus in Tectoreticular Neurons Projecting to Omnipause Neuron and Inhibitory Burst Neuron Regions

“…Extracellular recording of local field potentials or single-cell activity showed that visual responses in the superficial layers of the SC are inhibited by stimulation of the contralateral SC (Goodale 1973;Hoffmann and Straschill 1971;Mascetti and Arriagada 1981;Robert and Cuénod 1969). Similarly, tectal output neurons related to saccadic eye movements were found to be inhibited during ipsiversive orienting movements (Infante and Leiva 1986;Peck 1990) or by electrical stimulation of the contralateral SC (Munoz and Istvan 1998). With regard to these physiological studies, the anatomical features of commissural connections between the two SCs have been examined extensively (Behan and Kime 1996a;Edwards 1977;Fish et al 1982;Grantyn and Grantyn 1982;Magalhães-Castro et al 1978;Moschovakis and Karabelas 1985;Olivier et al 1998;Rhoades et al 1986;Yamasaki et al 1984).…”

Sensory regulation of dopaminergic cell activity: Phenomenology, circuitry and function

“…Likewise in the monkey, phasic responses in midbrain DA neurons have been described to auditory and simple visual stimuli which signal trial onset (Bayer and Glimcher, 2005;, and to the opening of a food box following training with food (Romo and Schultz, 1989;1990). They are also activated by simple visual stimuli (Schultz et al, 1993) and simple visual stimuli combined with auditory stimuli (Bayer and Glimcher, 2005) when associated with reward within a task.…”

“…In the case of vision, the short latency of the phasic DA responses led us to investigate the possibility that a subcortical visual structure, the superior colliculus (SC), rather than a cortical relay, might be the critical source of afferent visual input (Comoli et al, 2003, Dommett et al, 2005. Visual response latencies of SC neurons (40-60 ms - Wurtz and Albano, 1980, Munoz and Guitton, 1986, Jay and Sparks, 1987, Peck, 1990, Stein and Meredith, 1993, are consistently shorter than those of DA neurons (70-100 ms - Schultz, 1998, Morris et al, 2004, Takikawa et al, 2004, whilst responses in cortical regions responsible for feature detection and object recognition are approximately the same or longer (80-130 ms; Fabre-Thorpe, 2001, Rousselet et al, 2004).…”

“…These are usually considered to be 'novelty' responses, which tend to show habituation with repeated presentations. However, DA neurons in the food or fluid deprived monkey show nonhabituating unconditioned phasic responses to food when the food is touched (Romo and Schultz, 1989;1990), and juice when delivered directly into the mouth (Mirenowicz and Schultz, 1996;Hollerman and Schultz, 1998;Fiorillo et al, 2013b), suggesting that DA neurons respond phasically not only to visual and auditory stimuli, but also to somatosensory and gustatory stimuli. Interestingly, unconditioned non-noxious aversive stimuli also elicit phasic responses in midbrain DA neurons.…”