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Published January 6, 1989 | public
Journal Article

Gating of retinal transmission by afferent eye position and movement signals

Abstract

Vision in most vertebrates is an active process that requires the brain to combine retinal signals with information about eye movement. Eye movement information may feed forward from the motor control areas of the brain or feed back from the extrinsic eye muscles. Feedback signals elicited by passive eye movement selectively gate retinal outflow at the first relay, the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus. The gating predominantly facilitates retinogeniculate transmission immediately after eye movement and inhibits transmission when a new steady-state eye position is achieved. These two gating effects are distributed in a complementary fashion across the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus such that the spatiotemporal activity profile could contribute to object detection and localization.

Additional Information

© 1989 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received 11 July 1988; accepted 18 October 1988. Supported by NIH grant EY-05116 (M.J.F.), the National Society to Prevent Blindness (R.L.), and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (M.J.F.). We thank K. Ramer for software development, J. Rodda for technical assistance, Y. Fregnac and K. A. C. Martin for comments on the manuscript, D. L. Sparks and J. D. Porter for discussions of the experiments, and R. Enge for processing the manuscript.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 19, 2023