Development of coordinated eye and head movements during gaze shifts

Saccades comprise multi-segment control of different motor systems, i.e. the coordinated movement of several parts of the body including the eyes and the head. Experimental studies have revealed that during saccades, the motor system follows certain characteristics such as respecting a specific relationship between the relative contribution of eye and head to total gaze shift. Various optimality principles have been proposed to explain the stereotypical characteristics of coordinated eye and head movements [1,2]. However, the neural substrate of the underlying computations is usually left unspecified. At the same time, researchers have suggested several neural models to underly the generation of saccades, but these do not include online learning as a mechanism of optimization [3,4]. In this study, we suggest an open-loop neural architecture. We try to obtain an adaptation mechanism that on one hand can be implemented by the brain circuitry, and on the other hand minimizes a cost function. To this end, we propose a cost function that does not directly depend on saccadic duration as in previous studies, and therefore allows for a gradient descent based solution without any need to presume boudary conditions. The control pathway of our model is feedforward and is constantly calibrated by an adaptation mechanism. It can be regarded as a first step towards bringing together an optimality principle, a neural architecture, and a local adaptation mechanism into a unified control scheme for coordinated eye and head movements.

@InProceedings{SWT11a, 
 	 author =  {Saeb, Sohrab and Weber, Cornelius and Triesch, Jochen},  
 	 title = {Development of coordinated eye and head movements during gaze shifts}, 
 	 booktitle = {Proc. Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting (VSS’11)},
 	 number = {},
 	 volume = {},
 	 pages = {},
 	 year = {2011},
 	 month = {},
 	 publisher = {},
 	 doi = {}, 
 }