Grant: Operating Grant

One of the most important functions of the central nervous system is the generation of coordinated movement in response to, and in expectation of, the changing environment around us. The rapid movements of our eyes from one interesting visual object to another represents a simple sensory-to-motor transformation that has provided many significant insights into our understanding of how the brain controls movement. These eye movements, called saccades, can be triggered automatically, such as how fireworks can cause us to quickly orient toward them, or can be initiated voluntarily, such as when we are looking for a friend on a busy street corner. We can measure saccades very precisely in the laboratory. In human experiments, we investigate behaviour of control participants and patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders to identify specific deficits in eye movement control. In animal experiments, we measure the activity of individual neurons in different brain areas while animals make saccades and we use this information to infer how the system works in normal humans and patients. Many brain areas are interconnected to control eye movements. By combining the knowledge we gain from the human and animal experiments we hope to better understand how problems within this neural network lead to deficits in neurological and psychiatric patient groups. The purpose of this proposal is to further our knowledge of how these brain areas contribute to the initiation and suppression of saccades by recording from, and manipulating, neurons in key brain regions while animals perform sophisticated eye movement tasks that mimic human clinical experiments.