Abstract

We investigated how the brain selects the targets for eye movements, a process in which the outcome of visual pro-cessing is converted into guided action. Macaque monkeys were trained to make a saccade to fixate a salient target presented either alone or with multiple distracters during visual search. Neural activity was recorded in the frontal eye field, a cortical area at the interface of visual process-ing and eye movement production. Neurons discharging after stimulus presentation and before saccade initiation were analyzed. The initial visual response of frontal eye field neurons was modulated by the presence of multiple stimuli and by whether a saccade was going to be pro-duced, but the initial visual response did not discriminate the target of the search array from the distracters. In the latent period before saccade initiation, the activity of most

Citations