High-field FMRI reveals brain activation patterns underlying saccade execution in the human superior colliculus.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The superior colliculus (SC) has been shown to play a crucial role in
the initiation and coordination of eye- and head-movements. The knowledge about the
function of this structure is mainly based on single-unit recordings in animals with
relatively few neuroimaging studies investigating eye-movement related brain activity
in humans. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: The present study employed high-field (7
Tesla) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate SC responses during
endogenously cued saccades in humans. In response to centrally presented instructional
cues, subjects either performed saccades away from (centrifugal) or towards (centripetal)
the center of straight gaze or maintained fixation at the center position. Compared
to central fixation, the execution of saccades elicited hemodynamic activity within
a network of cortical and subcortical areas that included the SC, lateral geniculate
nucleus (LGN), occipital cortex, striatum, and the pulvinar. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE:
Activity in the SC was enhanced contralateral to the direction of the saccade (i.e.,
greater activity in the right as compared to left SC during leftward saccades and
vice versa) during both centrifugal and centripetal saccades, thereby demonstrating
that the contralateral predominance for saccade execution that has been shown to exist
in animals is also present in the human SC. In addition, centrifugal saccades elicited
greater activity in the SC than did centripetal saccades, while also being accompanied
by an enhanced deactivation within the prefrontal default-mode network. This pattern
of brain activity might reflect the reduced processing effort required to move the
eyes toward as compared to away from the center of straight gaze, a position that
might serve as a spatial baseline in which the retinotopic and craniotopic reference
frames are aligned.
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/4520Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1371/journal.pone.0008691Publication Info
Krebs, Ruth M; Woldorff, Marty G; Tempelmann, Claus; Bodammer, Nils; Noesselt, Toemme;
Boehler, Carsten N; ... Schoenfeld, Mircea A (2010). High-field FMRI reveals brain activation patterns underlying saccade execution in
the human superior colliculus. PloS one, 5(1). pp. e8691. 10.1371/journal.pone.0008691. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/4520.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Marty G. Woldorff
Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Dr. Woldorff's main research interest is in the cognitive neuroscience of attention.
At each and every moment of our lives, we are bombarded by a welter of sensory information
coming at us from a myriad of directions and through our various sensory modalities
-- much more than we can fully process. We must continuously select and extract the
most important information from this welter of sensory inputs. How the human brain
accomplishes this is one of the core challenges of modern cognitive neuro

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