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The Journal of Neuroscience, October 7, 2009, 29(40):12374-12383; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2908-09.2009

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Neural Dynamics of Saccadic Suppression

Frank Bremmer,1,2 Michael Kubischik,1 Klaus-Peter Hoffmann,1 and Bart Krekelberg3

1Department of Zoology and Neurobiology, Ruhr-University Bochum, D-44780 Bochum, Germany, 2Department of Physics, Marburg University, D-35032 Marburg, Germany, and 3Rutgers University, Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Newark, New Jersey 07102

Correspondence should be addressed to Frank Bremmer, Department of Neurophysics, Marburg University, Renthof 7, D-35032 Marburg, Germany. Email: frank.bremmer{at}physik.uni-marburg.de

We make fast, ballistic eye movements called saccades more often than our heart beats. Although every saccade causes a large movement of the image of the environment on our retina, we never perceive this motion. This aspect of perceptual stability is often referred to as saccadic suppression: a reduction of visual sensitivity around the time of saccades. Here, we investigated the neural basis of this perceptual phenomenon with extracellular recordings from awake, behaving monkeys in the middle temporal, medial superior temporal, ventral intraparietal, and lateral intraparietal areas. We found that, in each of these areas, the neural response to a visual stimulus changes around an eye movement. The perisaccadic response changes are qualitatively different in each of these areas, suggesting that they do not arise from a change in a common input area. Importantly, our data show that the suppression in the dorsal stream starts well before the eye movement. This clearly shows that the suppression is not just a consequence of the changes in visual input during the eye movement but rather must involve a process that actively modulates neural activity just before a saccade.

Received June 18, 2009; revised Aug. 20, 2009; accepted Aug. 24, 2009.

Correspondence should be addressed to Frank Bremmer, Department of Neurophysics, Marburg University, Renthof 7, D-35032 Marburg, Germany. Email: frank.bremmer{at}physik.uni-marburg.de


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