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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on January 24, 2007
Cerebral Cortex 2007 17(11):2618-2624; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl169
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Contribution of the Human FEF and SEF to Smooth Pursuit Initiation

Anthony S. Drew and Paul van Donkelaar

Department of Human Physiology and Institute of Neuroscience, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

Address correspondence to Dr Paul van Donkelaar, Department of Human Physiology, University of Oregon, 122C Esslinger Hall, Eugene, OR, USA. Email: paulvd{at}uoregon.edu.

Smooth pursuit eye movements function to keep moving targets foveated. Behavioral studies have shown that pursuit is particularly effective for predictable target motion. There is evidence that both the frontal eye field (FEF) and supplementary eye field (SEF) (also known as the dorsomedial frontal cortex) contribute to pursuit control. The goal of the current experiment was to determine whether these 2 areas made different contributions to the initiation of pursuit in response to predictable compared with unpredictable target motion. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was used in 5 healthy human participants to temporarily disrupt each area around the time of target motion onset. TMS over the FEF delayed contraversive pursuit markedly more than ipsiversive pursuit and this direction-dependent difference was more deeply modulated during pursuit of unpredictable than predictable target motion. By contrast, TMS over the SEF resulted in a much more muted modulation of pursuit latency that was similar across both predictable and unpredictable conditions. Taken together, we conclude that the human FEF, but not the SEF, makes a significant contribution to the processing required during the preparation of contraversive pursuit responses to unpredictable target motion and this contribution is less vital during pursuit to predictable target motion.

Key Words: FEF • latency • SEF • smooth pursuit • TMS


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