CEREBELLAR NUCLEI IN EYE MOVEMENT CONTROL

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. We use eye movements to study the cerebellum's role in movements. The cerebellum makes every movement we make as fast, accurate, and consistent as possible. Cerebellar damage leaves movements, including eye movements, slow, inaccurate and variable. It also abolishes the ability to adjust, or adapt, motor commands, including those for eye movements. This kind of adaptation is called motor learning. It occurs constantly in our lives to keep our movement accurate when movements become inaccurate because of growth, aging, trauma, or disease. We do four types of experiments. 1) We record the activity of neurons in an eye movement-related part of the cerebellum as monkeys make eye movements. 2) We measure eye movement abnormalities after we temporarily anesthetize an eye movement-related part of the cerebellum by injecting drugs into it. 3) We measure adaptation of eye movements when we make them seem to be inaccurate. We do this by moving the target toward which a monkey is making a rapid eye movement, called a saccade. When the eye movement ends it seems to have overshot the target. If a monkey tracks about 1000 target movements like this its saccades become significantly smaller. 4) We use anatomical tracers to determine which brain areas send signals to the eye-movement part of the cerebellum and which areas receive the eye-movement signals that the cerebellum creates. Together the results of these 4 types of studies are giving us an increasingly clear picture of what the cerebellum does and how it does it.