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The Journal of Neuroscience, April 22, 2009, 29(16):5308-5318; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4906-08.2009

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Frontal Eye Field Neurons with Spatial Representations Predicted by Their Subcortical Input

Trinity B. Crapse and Marc A. Sommer

Department of Neuroscience, Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, and Center for Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260

Correspondence should be addressed to Trinity B. Crapse, Department of Neuroscience, A210 Langley Hall, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Email: tbc6{at}pitt.edu

The frontal eye field (FEF) is a cortical structure involved in cognitive aspects of eye movement control. Neurons in the FEF, as in most of cerebral cortex, primarily represent contralateral space. They fire for visual stimuli in the contralateral field and for saccadic eye movements made to those stimuli. Yet many FEF neurons engage in sophisticated functions that require flexible spatial representations such as shifting receptive fields and vector subtraction. Such functions require knowledge about all of space, including the ipsilateral hemifield. How does the FEF gain access to ipsilateral information? Here, we provide evidence that one source of ipsilateral information may be the opposite superior colliculus (SC) in the midbrain. We physiologically identified neurons in the FEF that receive input from the opposite SC, same-side SC, or both. We found a striking structure–function relationship: the laterality of the response field of an FEF neuron was predicted by the laterality of its SC inputs. FEF neurons with input from the opposite SC had ipsilateral fields, whereas neurons with input from the same-side SC had contralateral fields. FEF neurons with input from both SCs had lateralized fields that could point in any direction. The results suggest that signals from the two SCs provide each FEF with information about all of visual space, a prerequisite for higher level sensorimotor computations.

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Received Oct. 11, 2008; revised March 12, 2009; accepted March 14, 2009.

Correspondence should be addressed to Trinity B. Crapse, Department of Neuroscience, A210 Langley Hall, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Email: tbc6{at}pitt.edu

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