CEREBRAL CORTICAL MECHANISMS FOR EYE MOVEMENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION

有两条线索被用来确定大脑皮层如何 它的传出区域控制着眼睛的运动和视觉空间 请注意。在一项研究中，我们研究了大脑后部神经元的活动。 在各种视觉运动任务中扣带，以确定它们的活动 关于自发地突出的或 用作扫视的目标。对突显有反应的神经元 视觉刺激，如棋盘，对小斑点没有反应 即使当这些斑点被用作扫视眼睛的目标时 或作为亮度检测任务中的刺激物。这些结果 表明大脑对待自愿注意的方式不同于 不由自主地注意到突出和新奇的刺激。扣带回皮质 在自愿但不是非自愿的产生中很重要 请注意。 第二条线是对视觉反应的研究 上丘的神经元。我们使用了视觉刺激 由眼球运动产生的了解运动的影响 对这些神经元的视觉反应进行规划。对于不同的 视神经运动中间层神经元亚群的分布 上丘，神经元会对视觉刺激做出反应 即将被带入他们的视觉接受领域 眼球跳动。这种预测性的视觉反应类似于 本组以前曾描述过的顶骨外侧区 顶叶皮质。它可以很好地描述一种通用机制，通过它 大脑在空间上实现了精确的行为。

Two lines of inquiry were followed to determine how the cerebral cortex and its efferent regions control eye movements and visuospatial attention. In one, we studied the activity of neurons in the posterior cingulate during various visuomotor tasks to determine their activity with respect to visual stimuli that were either spontaneously salient or used as the targets for saccades. Neurons that responded to salient visual stimuli, such as checkerboards, did not respond to small spots of light, even when those spots were used as targets for saccadic eye movements or as stimuli in a luminance-detection task. These results suggest that the brain treats voluntary attention differently from involuntary attention to salient and novel stimuli. The cingulate cortex is important in the generation of voluntary but not involuntary attention. The second line of inquiry was the study of visually responsive neurons in the superior colliculus. We used the visual stimulation engendered by eye movements to understand the effect of motor planning on the visual responsiveness of these neurons. For a distinct subpopulation of visuomovement neurons in the intermediate layers of the superior colliculus, the neurons would respond to visual stimuli that were about to be brought into their visual receptive fields by a saccadic eye movement. This predictive visual response resembled that previously described by this group for the lateral intraparietal area of the parietal cortex. It may well describe a general mechanism by which the brain achieves spatially accurate behavior.