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The Journal of Neuroscience, January 21, 2009, 29(3):591-599; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4803-08.2009

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Monkey Supplementary Eye Field Neurons Signal the Ordinal Position of Both Actions and Objects

Tamara K. Berdyyeva^1,2 and Carl R. Olson^1,2

¹Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Mellon Institute, and ²Department of Biological Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213

Correspondence should be addressed to Carl R. Olson, Department of Biological Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. Email: tberdyye{at}andrew.cmu.edu

When a monkey executes a learned series of eye movements (for example, rightward followed by upward followed by leftward), neurons in the supplementary eye field (SEF) fire differentially in conjunction with the first, second, and third movements. It has not been clear whether such ordinal position signals are truly general, accompanying all forms of sequential behavior, or accompany only learned sequences of movements. To resolve this issue, we trained monkeys to perform both a serial action task (making saccades in a fixed sequence of directions) and a serial object task (making saccades to a fixed sequence of objects). We found concordant ordinal position selectivity in the two tasks. Neuronal selectivity for the passage of time and expectation of reward could not explain such concordance. We conclude that SEF neurons signal ordinal position consistently across different task contexts. These signals presumably underlie the ability of primates including humans to perform a broad range of serial order tasks.

Key words: monkey; supplementary eye field; neuronal activity; serial order; reward; context independent

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Received Oct. 6, 2008; revised Nov. 12, 2008; accepted Dec. 3, 2008.

Correspondence should be addressed to Carl R. Olson, Department of Biological Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. Email: tberdyye{at}andrew.cmu.edu

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