The Neural Control of Visually Guided Eye Movements

E. Ongoing Research in the Schiller Lab

To learn more about the role of various cortical areas in the generation of visually guided eye movements we are continuing our efforts along several fronts using single-cell recordings, micrositmulation, lesions, and the delivery of pharmacological agents to various brain regions.

Another aspect of our work involves the study of patients with various brain infarcts using the paired target task described above. This approach is of considerable interest in that earlier work on humans had shown that after parietal damage many patients ignore a target appearing in the contralateral space to the lesion when paired with an ipsilateral target but not when the target appears alone. This effect, which has been termed the extinction phenomenon (the ipsilateral target extinguishes the perception of the contralateral one) we believe is in part due to a slow-down in processing on the damaged side. We test this by systematically varying the temporal asynchrony between the targets as well as their composition (relative intensity, size, color, etc). We hope that this effort will provide further insights about the way we process information and respond to stimuli in the environment.