Our lab participated in this year’s Neural Control of Movement Society Annual Meeting, which took place in Dublin, Ireland.
We gave two presentations on sensory responses in the oculomotor system.
In the first presentation, Antimo described intriguing visual pattern analysis abilities in brainstem omnipause neurons, the very final gate in controlling saccades. It turns out that these responses serve a very important motor function. They allow regularizing the race condition that will inevitably arise when an external stimulus event occurs in our environment: the brain has to quickly decide between responding to the external event or first completing its current task. Regularizing such an interrupt mechanism is very important for rapid eye movements, and the visual responses in brainstem omnipause neurons can do exactly that.
In the second presentation, we showed work by Amar Bogadhi, Matthias Baumann, and Anna Denninger describing a surprising discovery that eye movement commands from the superior colliculus have a fundamentally visual signal embedded within them.
The meeting was also special for two additional reasons.
First, Antimo won a scholarship award for his submission to this meeting.
Second, there was a satellite workshop aimed at honoring the many contributions of W. Michael King to research on the oculomotor system. Our lab was invited to present at this workshop, and Antimo had a chance to present his work as our representative at the workshop.