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The Journal of Neuroscience, April 19, 2006, 26(16):4228-4235; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3336-05.2006

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Contribution of the Monkey Frontal Eye Field to Covert Visual Attention

Claire Wardak,¹ Guilhem Ibos,¹ Jean-René Duhamel,¹ and Etienne Olivier^1,2

¹Institut des Sciences Cognitives, Unité Mixte de Recherche 5015, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique–Université Claude Bernard Lyon I, 69675 Bron, France, and ²Laboratoire de Neurophysiologie, Université Catholique de Louvain, B-1200 Brussels, Belgium

Correspondence should be addressed to Jean-René Duhamel, Institut des Sciences Cognitives, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 67 Bd Pinel, 69675 Bron, France. Email: duhamel{at}isc.cnrs.fr

The frontal eye field (FEF) has long been regarded as a cortical area critically involved in the execution of voluntary saccadic eye movements. However, recent studies have suggested that the FEF may also play a role in orienting attention. To address this issue, we reversibly inactivated the FEF using multiple microinjections of muscimol, a GABA_A agonist, in two macaque monkeys performing visually guided saccades to a single target. The effects of FEF inactivation were also studied in a covert visual search task that required monkeys to search for a target presented among several distractors without making any eye movements.

As expected, inactivating the FEF caused spatially selective deficits in executing visually guided saccades, but it also altered the ability to detect a visual target presented among distractors when no eye movements were permitted. These results allow us to conclude definitively to an involvement of the FEF in both oculomotor and attentional functions. Comparison of the present results with a similar experiment conducted in the lateral intraparietal cortex area revealed qualitatively different deficits, suggesting that the two areas may make distinct contributions to selective attention processes.

Key words: saccades; target selection; monkey; FEF; inactivation; visual salience

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Received Aug. 9, 2005; revised Feb. 20, 2006; accepted Feb. 20, 2006.

Correspondence should be addressed to Jean-René Duhamel, Institut des Sciences Cognitives, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 67 Bd Pinel, 69675 Bron, France. Email: duhamel{at}isc.cnrs.fr

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