Processing of retinal and extraretinal signals for memory guided saccades during smooth pursuit

Abstract

of retinal and extraretinal signals for memory-guided saccades during smooth pursuit. J Neurophysiol 93: 1510–1522, 2005. First published October 13, 2004; doi:10.1152/jn.00543.2004. It is an essential feature for the visual system to keep track of self-motion to maintain space constancy. Therefore the saccadic system uses extraretinal information about previous saccades to update the internal representation of memorized targets, an ability that has been identified in behavioral and electrophysiological studies. However, a smooth eye movement induced in the latency period of a memory-guided saccade yielded contradictory results. Indeed some studies described spatially accurate saccades, whereas others reported retinal coding of saccades. Today, it is still unclear how the saccadic system keeps track of smooth eye movements in the absence of vision. Here, we developed an original two-dimensional behavioral paradigm to further investigate how smooth eye displacements could be compensated to ensur