A novel interpretation for the collicular role in saccade generation

Abstract

Recently, we found evidence that the activity of neurons in the deep layers of the monkey superior colliculus (SC) is modulated by initial eye position (gain fields). In this paper, we propose a quantitative model of the motor SC which incorporates these new findings. Inputs to the motor map represent the desired eye displacement vector (motor error), as well as initial eye position. A unit's activity in the motor map is described by multiplying a weak linear eye position sensitivity with a gaussian tuning to motor error. The motor map projects to several sets of output neurons, representing the coordinates of the desired eye displacement vector, the desired eye position in the head, and the three-dimensional ocular rotation axis for saccades in Listing's plane, respectively. All these signals have been hypothesized in the literature to drive the saccade burst generator. We show that these signals can be extracted from the motor map by a linear weighting of the population activity. The saccadic system may employ all coding strategies in parallel to ensure high spatial accuracy in many complex sensorimotor tasks, such as orienting to multimodal stimuli.