A test of spatial temporal decoding mechanisms in the superior colliculus

作者：Katnani Husam A^*; Van Opstal A J; Gandhi Neeraj J

来源：Journal of Neurophysiology, 2012, 107(9): 2442-2452.

DOI：10.1152/jn.00992.2011

• microstimulation
• spatiotemporal
• vector summation
• vector averaging

Katnani HA, Van Opstal AJ, Gandhi NJ. A test of spatial temporal decoding mechanisms in the superior colliculus. J Neurophysiol 107: 2442-2452, 2012. First published January 25, 2012; doi:10.1152/jn.00992.2011.-Population coding is a ubiquitous principle in the nervous system for the proper control of motor behavior. A significant amount of research is dedicated to studying population activity in the superior colliculus (SC) to investigate the motor control of saccadic eye movements. Vector summation with saturation (VSS) has been proposed as a mechanism for how population activity in the SC can be decoded to generate saccades. Interestingly, the model produces different predictions when decoding two simultaneous populations at high vs. low levels of activity. We tested these predictions by generating two simultaneous populations in the SC with high or low levels of dual microstimulation. We also combined varying levels of stimulation with visually induced activity. We found that our results did not perfectly conform to the predictions of the VSS scheme and conclude that the simplest implementation of the model is incomplete. We propose that additional parameters to the model might account for the results of this investigation.

• 出版日期2012-5