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The Journal of Neuroscience, April 28, 2004, 24(17):4124-4133; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0172-04.2004

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
The Role of the Frontal Pursuit Area in Learning in Smooth Pursuit Eye Movements

I-han Chou and Stephen G. Lisberger

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Physiology, and W. M. Keck Foundation Center for Integrative Neuroscience, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94143-0444

The frontal pursuit area (FPA) in the cerebral cortex is part of the circuit for smooth pursuit eye movements. The present paper asks whether the FPA is upstream, downstream, or at the site of learning in pursuit eye movements. Learning was induced by having monkeys repeatedly pursue targets that moved at one speed for 150 msec before changing speed. Single-cell recording showed no consistent correlate of pursuit learning in the responses of FPA neurons. Some neurons showed changes in firing in the same direction as the learning, others showed changes in the opposite direction, and many showed no changes at all. In contrast, the eye movements evoked by electrical stimulation of the FPA showed clear correlates of learning. Learning effects were observed when microstimulation was delivered during the initiation of pursuit and during fixation of a stationary target. In addition, learning caused changes in the degree to which stimulation of the FPA enhanced the eye velocity evoked by brief perturbations of a stationary target. The magnitude of the change in the stimulation-evoked eye movement in each tracking condition was proportional to the size of the eye movement evoked under that condition before learning. We conclude that learning occurs downstream from the FPA, possibly within the cerebellum, and that learning may be related to mechanisms that also control the gain of visual-motor responses on a rapid time scale.

Key words: motor cortex; gain control; visual-motor transformation; cerebellum; MT; MST

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Received Jan 16, 2004; revised March 13, 2004; accepted March 15, 2004.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				H. W. Heuer, S. Tokiyama, and S. G. Lisberger Doing Without Learning: Stimulation of the Frontal Eye Fields and Floccular Complex Does Not Instruct Motor Learning in Smooth Pursuit Eye Movements J Neurophysiol, September 1, 2008; 100(3): 1320 - 1331. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				S. Ono and M. J. Mustari Horizontal Smooth Pursuit Adaptation in Macaques After Muscimol Inactivation of the Dorsolateral Pontine Nucleus (DLPN) J Neurophysiol, November 1, 2007; 98(5): 2918 - 2932. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				A. A. Tarnutzer, S. Ramat, D. Straumann, and D. S. Zee Pursuit Responses to Target Steps During Ongoing Tracking J Neurophysiol, February 1, 2007; 97(2): 1266 - 1279. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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