Whisker Movements Reveal Spatial Attention: A Unified Computational Model of Active Sensing Control in the Rat

Spatial attention is most often investigated in the visual modality through measurement of eye movements, with primates, including humans, a widely-studied model. Its study in laboratory rodents, such as mice and rats, requires different techniques, owing to the lack of a visual fovea and the particular ethological relevance of orienting movements of the snout and the whiskers in these animals. In recent years, several reliable relationships have been observed between environmental and behavioural variables and movements of the whiskers, but the function of these responses, as well as how they integrate, remains unclear. Here, we propose a unifying abstract model of whisker movement control that has as its key variable the region of space that is the animal's current focus of attention, and demonstrate, using computer-simulated behavioral experiments, that the model is consistent with a broad range of experimental observations. A core hypothesis is that the rat explicitly decodes the location in space of whisker contacts and that this representation is used to regulate whisker drive signals. This proposition stands in contrast to earlier proposals that the modulation of whisker movement during exploration is mediated primarily by reflex loops. We go on to argue that the superior colliculus is a candidate neural substrate for the siting of a head-centred map guiding whisker movement, in analogy to current models of visual attention. The proposed model has the potential to offer a more complete understanding of whisker control as well as to highlight the potential of the rodent and its whiskers as a tool for the study of mammalian attention

Glissades Are Altered by Lesions to the Oculomotor Vermis but Not by Saccadic Adaptation

Saccadic eye movements enable fast and precise scanning of the visual field, which is partially controlled by the posterior cerebellar vermis. Textbook saccades have a straight trajectory and a unimodal velocity profile, and hence have well-defined epochs of start and end. However, in practice only a fraction of saccades matches this description. One way in which a saccade can deviate from its trajectory is the presence of an overshoot or undershoot at the end of a saccadic eye movement just before fixation. This additional movement, known as a glissade, is regarded as a motor command error and was characterized decades ago but was almost never studied. Using rhesus macaques, we investigated the properties of glissades and changes to glissade kinematics following cerebellar lesions. Additionally, in monkeys with an intact cerebellum, we investigated whether the glissade amplitude can be modulated using multiple adaptation paradigms. Our results show that saccade kinematics are altered by the presence of a glissade, and that glissades do not appear to have any adaptive function as they do not bring the eye closer to the target. Quantification of these results establishes a detailed description of glissades. Further, we show that lesions to the posterior cerebellum have a deleterious effect on both saccade and glissade properties, which recovers over time. Finally, the saccadic adaptation experiments reveal that glissades cannot be modulated by this training paradigm. Together our work offers a functional study of glissades and provides new insight into the cerebellar involvement in this type of motor error

Visual exploration pattern in hemineglect

The analysis of eye movement parameters in visual neglect such as cumulative fixation duration, saccade amplitude, or the numbers of saccades has been used to probe attention deficits in neglect patients, since the pattern of exploratory eye movements has been taken as a strong index of attention distribution. The current overview of the literature of visual neglect has its emphasis on studies dealing with eye movement and exploration analysis. We present our own results in 15 neglect patients. The free exploration behavior was analyzed in these patients presenting 32 naturalistic color photographs of everyday scenes. Cumulative fixation duration, spatial distribution of fixations in the horizontal and vertical plane, the number and amplitude of exploratory saccades was analyzed and compared with the results of an age-matched control group. A main result of our study was that in neglect patients, fixation distribution of free exploration of natural scenes is not only influenced by the left-right bias in the horizontal direction but also by the vertical direction

Data_Sheet_1_Glissades Are Altered by Lesions to the Oculomotor Vermis but Not by Saccadic Adaptation.docx

Saccadic eye movements enable fast and precise scanning of the visual field, which is partially controlled by the posterior cerebellar vermis. Textbook saccades have a straight trajectory and a unimodal velocity profile, and hence have well-defined epochs of start and end. However, in practice only a fraction of saccades matches this description. One way in which a saccade can deviate from its trajectory is the presence of an overshoot or undershoot at the end of a saccadic eye movement just before fixation. This additional movement, known as a glissade, is regarded as a motor command error and was characterized decades ago but was almost never studied. Using rhesus macaques, we investigated the properties of glissades and changes to glissade kinematics following cerebellar lesions. Additionally, in monkeys with an intact cerebellum, we investigated whether the glissade amplitude can be modulated using multiple adaptation paradigms. Our results show that saccade kinematics are altered by the presence of a glissade, and that glissades do not appear to have any adaptive function as they do not bring the eye closer to the target. Quantification of these results establishes a detailed description of glissades. Further, we show that lesions to the posterior cerebellum have a deleterious effect on both saccade and glissade properties, which recovers over time. Finally, the saccadic adaptation experiments reveal that glissades cannot be modulated by this training paradigm. Together our work offers a functional study of glissades and provides new insight into the cerebellar involvement in this type of motor error.</p