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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on October 1, 2008
Cerebral Cortex 2009 19(5):1144-1150; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn162
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

TMS Evidence for Smooth Pursuit Gain Control by the Frontal Eye Fields

Ulrich Nuding1, Roger Kalla2, Neil G. Muggleton2, Ulrich Büttner1, Vincent Walsh2 and Stefan Glasauer1

1 Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience & Department of Neurology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany, 2 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience & Department of Psychology, University College London, UK

Address correspondence to Stefan Glasauer, PhD, Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Marchioninistr. 23, 81377 Munich, Germany. Email: SGlasauer{at}nefo.med.uni-muenchen.de.

Smooth pursuit eye movements are used to continuously track slowly moving visual objects. A peculiar property of the smooth pursuit system is the nonlinear increase in sensitivity to changes in target motion with increasing pursuit velocities. We investigated the role of the frontal eye fields (FEFs) in this dynamic gain control mechanism by application of transcranial magnetic stimulation. Subjects were required to pursue a slowly moving visual target whose motion consisted of 2 components: a constant velocity component at 4 different velocities (0, 8, 16, and 24 deg/s) and a superimposed high-frequency sinusoidal oscillation (4 Hz, ±8 deg/s). Magnetic stimulation of the FEFs reduced not only the overall gain of the system, but also the efficacy of the dynamic gain control. We thus provide the first direct evidence that the FEF population is significantly involved in the nonlinear computation necessary for continuously adjusting the feedforward gain of the pursuit system. We discuss this with relation to current models of smooth pursuit.

Key Words: gain modulation • sensorimotor transformation • sensory reweighting • transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)


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