The long-term goal of our research is to understand how the visual system decides where to look. The activity of many neurons will be monitored simultaneously in monkeys performing visual search tasks. Experiments will manipulate the properties of targets and distractors across or within trials. The frontal eye field will be studied because it is positioned anatomically to convert the outcome of visual processing into a command to orient gaze. The visuomotor thalamic nuclei that are connected with frontal eye field will be studied because very little is known about thalamocortical transformations in this pathway. Patterns of ensemble neural activity will be analyzed to evaluate specific hypotheses abut how visual information is encoded and flows between visual selection and saccade programming stages of processing (Aim 1) and to determine how cognitive representations influence the visual selection process (Aim 2). Reconstructions of recording sites will be correlated with connectivity and architecture to describe the functional architecture of the frontal eye field (Aim 3) and the visuomotor thalamic nuclei (Aim 4). Understanding how the brain normally selects visual stimuli for action is necessary to understand the causes of impaired visual behavior.
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