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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on August 26, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp180
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© 2009 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Representation of Neck Velocity and Neck–Vestibular Interactions in Pursuit Neurons in the Simian Frontal Eye Fields

Kikuro Fukushima1, Teppei Akao1, Hiroshi Saito1,2, Sergei A. Kurkin1, Junko Fukushima2 and Barry W. Peterson3

1 Department of Physiology, 2 Department of Health Sciences, Hokkaido University School of Medicine, Sapporo 060-8638, Japan, 3 Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago, IL 60611, USA

Address correspondence to Kikuro Fukushima, MD, DMS, Department of Physiology, Hokkaido University School of Medicine, West 7, North 15, Sapporo, Hokkaido, 060-8638 Japan. Email: kikuro{at}med.hokudai.ac.jp.

The smooth pursuit system must interact with the vestibular system to maintain the accuracy of eye movements in space (i.e., gaze-movement) during head movement. Normally, the head moves on the stationary trunk. Vestibular signals cannot distinguish whether the head or whole body is moving. Neck proprioceptive inputs provide information about head movements relative to the trunk. Previous studies have shown that the majority of pursuit neurons in the frontal eye fields (FEF) carry visual information about target velocity, vestibular information about whole-body movements, and signal eye- or gaze-velocity. However, it is unknown whether FEF neurons carry neck proprioceptive signals. By passive trunk-on-head rotation, we tested neck inputs to FEF pursuit neurons in 2 monkeys. The majority of FEF pursuit neurons tested that had horizontal preferred directions (87%) responded to horizontal trunk-on-head rotation. The modulation consisted predominantly of velocity components. Discharge modulation during pursuit and trunk-on-head rotation added linearly. During passive head-on-trunk rotation, modulation to vestibular and neck inputs also added linearly in most neurons, although in half of gaze-velocity neurons neck responses were strongly influenced by the context of neck rotation. Our results suggest that neck inputs could contribute to representing eye- and gaze-velocity FEF signals in trunk coordinates.

Key Words: coordinate frame • frontal eye fields • monkey • neck proprioception • smooth pursuit • vestibular system


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