Learning from cerebellar lesions about the temporal and spatial aspects of saccadic control

Abstract

In the model proposed by Findlay & Walker, the programming of saccadic eye movements is achieved by two parallel processes, one dedicated to the coding of saccade metrics (Where) and the other controlling saccade initiation (When). One outcome of the “winner-take-all” characteristics of the salience map, the main node of the model, is an independence between the metrics and the latency of saccades. We report on some observations, made in the head-unrestrained cat under pathological conditions, of a correlation between accuracy and latency of saccadic gaze shifts. To account for such a correlation, the link between metrics specification (Where) and saccade triggering (When) should be amended in the model.