Electrical Stimulation of the Frontal Eye Fields in the Head-Free Macaque Evokes Kinematically Normal 3D Gaze Shifts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The frontal eye field (FEF) is a region of the primate prefrontal cortex that is central to eye-movement generation and target selection. It has been shown that neurons in this area encode commands for saccadic eye movements. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the FEF may be involved in the generation of gaze commands for the eye and the head. To test this suggestion, we systematically stimulated (with pulses of 300 Hz frequency, 200 ms duration, 30-100 μA intensity) the FEF of two macaques, with the head unrestrained, while recording three-dimensional (3D) eye and head rotations. In a total of 95 sites, the stimulation consistently elicited gaze-orienting movements ranging in amplitude from 2 to 172°, directed contralateral to the stimulation site, and with variable vertical components. These movements were typically a combination of eye-in-head saccades and head-in-space movements. We then performed a comparison between the stimulation-evoked movements and gaze shifts voluntarily made by the animal. The kinematics of the stimulation-evoked movements (i.e., their spatiotemporal properties, their velocity-amplitude relationships, and the relative contributions of the eye and the head as a function of movement amplitude) were very similar to those of natural gaze shifts. Moreover, they obeyed the same 3D constraints as the natural gaze shifts (i.e., modified Listing's law for eye-in-head movements). As in natural gaze shifts, saccade and vestibuloocular reflex torsion during stimulation-evoked movements were coordinated so that at the end of the head movement the eye-in-head ended up in Listing's plane. In summary, movements evoked by stimulation of the FEF closely resembled those of naturally occurring eye-head gaze shifts. Thus we conclude that the FEF explicitly encodes gaze commands and that the kinematic aspects of eye-head coordination are likely specified by downstream mechanisms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".