We record the behavior of cells located in two structures of the brain that are known to receive rather direct or indirect input from the retina and also control saccadic eye movements, the superior colliculus (SC) and the cortical frontal eye fields (FEF). Both structures contain neurons which are activated by small, stationary visual stimuli and in both the location of a visual stimulus is encoded by the center of an activated population of cells. The anatomic location of these activated cells as a function of target location forms a topographically organized map of stimulus location. Both structures also contain neurons that discharge in association with the saccadic eye movement. This latter discharge remains spatially coded. Our recent studies have provided the first dynamic maps of how this population discharge changes in space and time on the SC from the time of visual input to the completion of the saccade to the stimulus. Since it is not currently possible to record simultaneously from the whole population of activated cells, we have to depend on neurocomputational methods and single cell recordings made over extended periods of time to make estimates of this discharge. Publications listed below describe the computation techniques and neurophysiological results.

Anderson, R.W., Keller, E.L., Gandhi, N.J. and Das, S. Two-dimensional saccade-related population activity in superior colliculus in monkey. J. Neurophysiol. 80: 798-817, 1998.

Anderson, R.W., Das, S. and Keller, E.L. Estimation of spatio-temporal neural activity using radial basis function networks. J. Computational Neuroscience, 5:421-441,1998.