Our lab participated in this year’s Bernstein Conference in Berlin, Germany. The conference is organized annually by the Bernstein Network for Computational Neuroscience, which we are a part of.
In this year’s conference, Matthias presented our observations on sensory tuning in superior colliculus neuronal movement commands. This is a highly intriguing discovery:
We specifically studied the strong “motor” bursts that are emitted in the superior colliculus at the time of rapid eye movement generation. Current thoughts suggest that these bursts control the eye movements, acting as a kind of “motor command”.
In our work, we tried to see what happens if saccades are generated towards different kinds of images. That is, you can make a rightward saccade to look at a face or at an animal or at an object. Surprisingly, for the very same saccades, the superior colliculus motor bursts were different for different kinds of images as the eye movement targets. Thus, the superior colliculus neuronal movement commands are sensory tuned!
We hope that you will read about these intriguing results very soon!