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The Journal of Neuroscience, May 24, 2006, 26(21):5616-5627; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0730-06.2006

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Representation of Head-Centric Flow in the Human Motion Complex

Jeroen Goossens,^1,2 Sean P. Dukelow,³ Ravi S. Menon,⁴ Tutis Vilis,⁵ and Albert V. van den Berg⁶

¹Department of Biophysics, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands, ²F. C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands, ³Graduate Program in Neuroscience, Siebens-Drake Research Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6G 2V4, ⁴Advanced Imaging Labs, The John P. Robarts Research Institute, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5K8, ⁵Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5C1, and ⁶Helmholtz Institute, Functional Neurobiology, University of Utrecht, 3584 CH Utrecht, The Netherlands

Correspondence should be addressed to Jeroen Goossens, Department of Biophysics, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, G. Grooteplein 21, P.O. Box 9101, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Email: j.goossens{at}science.ru.nl

Recent neuroimaging studies have identified putative homologs of macaque middle temporal area (area MT) and medial superior temporal area (area MST) in humans. Little is known about the integration of visual and nonvisual signals in human motion areas compared with monkeys. Through extra-retinal signals, the brain can factor out the components of visual flow on the retina that are induced by eye-in-head and head-in-space rotations and achieve a representation of flow relative to the head (head-centric flow) or body (body-centric flow).

Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to test whether extra-retinal eye-movement signals modulate responses to visual flow in the human MT+ complex. We distinguished between MT and MST and tested whether subdivisions of these areas may transform the retinal flow into head-centric flow.

We report that interactions between eye-movement signals and visual flow are not evenly distributed across MT+. Pursuit hardly influenced the response of MT to flow, whereas the responses in MST to the same retinal stimuli were stronger during pursuit than during fixation. We also identified two subregions in which the flow-related responses were boosted significantly by pursuit, one overlapping part of MST. In addition, we found evidence of a metric relation between rotational flow relative to the head and fMRI signals in a subregion of MST. The latter findings provide an important advance over published single-cell recordings in monkey MST. A visual representation of the rotation of the head in the world derived from head-centric flow may supplement semicircular canals signals and is appropriate for cross-calibrating vestibular and visual signals.

Key words: heading; optic flow; pursuit eye movements; head movements; reference frames; spatial perception; vestibular

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Received Sept. 13, 2005; revised April 11, 2006; accepted April 11, 2006.

Correspondence should be addressed to Jeroen Goossens, Department of Biophysics, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, G. Grooteplein 21, P.O. Box 9101, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Email: j.goossens{at}science.ru.nl

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