When some event catches our attention we orient to the stimulus with a coordinated turn of the head and eyes. This project explores the neural circuits that allow vision to guide this shift of gaze. Most previous research has simplified the study of gaze by holding the subject's head rigid, thereby reducng the gaze movement to a movement of the eyes. This sensible strategy may have led to a bias in the understanding of the function of several brain structures. In particular, the "frontal eye fields" in the frontal lobe has been described almost strictly in terms of its control of eye movements, in the primate. Recent evidence suggests that this structure may be more widely involved in the control of gaze. The project proposes stimulation, lesion and recording studies designed to confirm the role of the frontal eye fields in controlling both eye and head movements. All of the studies employ a behavioral task which will reveal if this brain areas is mapped to command eye, head, or gaze movements, and also to determine if its output specifies a vector of movement or a desired final position.
