Evidence for Peak-Shaped Gaze Fields in Area V6A: Implications for Sensorimotor Transformations in Reaching Tasks

  • Authors:

  • Rossella Breveglieri;Annalisa Bosco;Andrea Canessa;Patrizia Fattori;Silvio P. Sabatini

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Human and General Physiology, University of Bologna,;Department of Human and General Physiology, University of Bologna,;Department of Biophysical and Electronic Engineering, University of Genoa,;Department of Human and General Physiology, University of Bologna,;Department of Biophysical and Electronic Engineering, University of Genoa,

  • Venue:
  • IWINAC '09 Proceedings of the 3rd International Work-Conference on The Interplay Between Natural and Artificial Computation: Part II: Bioinspired Applications in Artificial and Natural Computation
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

The area V6A of the medial parieto-occipital cortex of the macaque is studied for gaze sensitivity. The reported experimental observations support the computational theory of the gain fields to produce a distributed representation of the real position of targets in head-centered coordinates. Although it was originally pointed out that the majority of the cells exhibit roughly linear gain fields [1] [2], we have verified that the peak-shaped gaze fields reported in this study are not in contrast with the gain field models developed in the theoretical neuroscience literature [3] [4]. Rather, the use of peak-shaped (e.g., non monotonic) gaze fields even improves the efficiency of the coding scheme by reducing the number of units that are necessary to encode the target position.