Neural control of eye movements

Understanding how events in the external world guide actions provides a fruitful and important domain for engineers and biologists to interact. Visuomotor control of eye movements provides an elegant model system to investigate mechanisms of selection and control. This paper describes the work that has focused on the neural processes that select the target for an eye movement and the neural processes that regulate the production of eye movements. Current evidence indicates that salient visual targets are located through a temporal evolution of a selection process in which the responses to nontarget stimuli are suppressed, leaving the activation representing the target maximal. Once achieved, the selection of the target leads to stochastic growth of movement-related activity towards a fixed threshold to generate the gaze shift. The signals and processes that have been observed in areas of cerebral cortex of behaving monkeys may motivate biologically inspired solutions to some engineering problems in robotics.