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We used a memory-saccade task to test whether the location of a target, briefly presented before a whole-body rotation in roll, is stored in egocentric or in allocentric coordinates. To make this distinction, we exploited the fact that subjects, when tilted sideways in darkness, make systematic errors when indicating the direction of gravity (an allocentric task) even though they have a veridical percept of their self-orientation in space. We hypothesized that if spatial memory is coded allocentrically, these distortions affect the coding of remembered targets and their readout after a body rotation. Alternatively, if coding is egocentric, updating for body rotation becomes essential and errors in performance should be related to the amount of intervening rotation. Subjects (n = 6) were tested making saccades to remembered world-fixed targets after passive body tilts. Initial and final tilt angle ranged between -120 degrees CCW and 120 degrees CW. The results showed that subjects made large systematic directional errors in their saccades (up to 90 degrees ). These errors did not occur in the absence of intervening body rotation, ruling out a memory degradation effect. Regression analysis showed that the errors were closely related to the amount of subjective allocentric distortion at both the initial and final tilt angle, rather than to the amount of intervening rotation. We conclude that the brain uses an allocentric reference frame, possibly gravity-based, to code visuospatial memories during whole-body tilts. This supports the notion that the brain can define information in multiple frames of reference, depending on sensory inputs and task demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neural oscillations have emerged as one of the major electrophysiological phenomena investigated in cognitive and systems neuroscience. These oscillations are typically studied with regard to their amplitude, phase, and/or phase coupling. Here we demonstrate the existence of another property that is intrinsic to neural oscillations but has hitherto remained largely unexplored in cognitive and systems neuroscience. This pertains to the notion that these oscillations show reliable diversity in their phase-relations between neighboring recording sites (phase-relation diversity). In contrast to most previous work, we demonstrate that this diversity is restricted neither to low-frequency oscillations nor to periods outside of sensory stimulation. On the basis of magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings in humans, we show that this diversity is prominent not only for ongoing alpha oscillations (8-12 Hz) but also for gamma oscillations (50-70 Hz) that are induced by sustained visual stimulation. We further show that this diversity provides a dimension within electrophysiological data that, provided a sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratio, does not covary with changes in amplitude. These observations place phase-relation diversity on the map as a prominent and general property of neural oscillations that, moreover, can be studied with noninvasive methods in healthy human volunteers. This opens important new avenues for investigating how neural oscillations contribute to the neural implementation of cognition and behavior., (Copyright © 2015 the American Physiological Society.)

The path from perception to action involves the transfer of information across various reference frames. Here we applied a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) repetition suppression paradigm to determine the reference frame(s) in which the cortical activity is coded at several phases of the sensorimotor transformation for a saccade, including sensory processing, saccade planning, and saccade execution. We distinguished between retinal (eye-centered) and nonretinal (e.g., head-centered) coding frames in three key regions: the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), frontal eye field (FEF), and supplementary eye field (SEF). Subjects (n = 18) made delayed saccades to one of five possible peripheral targets, separated at intervals of 9° visual angle. Target locations were chosen pseudorandomly, based on a 2 × 2 factorial design, with factors retinal and nonretinal coordinates and levels novel and repeated. In all three regions, analysis of the blood oxygenation level dependent dynamics revealed an attenuation of the fMRI signal in trials repeating the location of the target in retinal coordinates. The amount of retinal suppression varied across the three phases of the trial, with the strongest suppression during saccade planning. The paradigm revealed only weak traces of nonretinal coding in these regions. Further analyses showed an orderly representation of the retinal target location, as expressed by a contralateral bias of activation, in the IPS and FEF, but not in the SEF. These results provide evidence that the sensorimotor processing in these centers reflects saccade generation in eye-centered coordinates, irrespective of their topographic organization.

We tested between two coding mechanisms that the brain may use to retain distance information about a target for a reaching movement across vergence eye movements. If the brain was to encode a retinal disparity representation (retinal model), i.e., target depth relative to the plane of fixation, each vergence eye movement would require an active update of this representation to preserve depth constancy. Alternatively, if the brain was to store an egocentric distance representation of the target by integrating retinal disparity and vergence signals at the moment of target presentation, this representation should remain stable across subsequent vergence shifts (nonretinal model). We tested between these schemes by measuring errors of human reaching movements (n = 14 subjects) to remembered targets, briefly presented before a vergence eye movement. For comparison, we also tested their directional accuracy across version eye movements. With intervening vergence shifts, the memory-guided reaches showed an error pattern that was based on the new eye position and on the depth of the remembered target relative to that position. This suggests that target depth is recomputed after the gaze shift, supporting the retinal model. Our results also confirm earlier literature showing retinal updating of target direction. Furthermore, regression analyses revealed updating gains close to one for both target depth and direction, suggesting that the errors arise after the updating stage during the subsequent reference frame transformations that are involved in reaching.

Various cortical and sub-cortical brain structures update the gaze-centered coordinates of remembered stimuli to maintain an accurate representation of visual space across eyes rotations and to produce suitable motor plans. A major challenge for the computations by these structures is updating across eye translations. When the eyes translate, objects in front of and behind the eyes' fixation point shift in opposite directions on the retina due to motion parallax. It is not known if the brain uses gaze coordinates to compute parallax in the translational updating of remembered space or if it uses gaze-independent coordinates to maintain spatial constancy across translational motion. We tested this by having subjects view targets, flashed in darkness in front of or behind fixation, then translate their body sideways, and subsequently reach to the memorized target. Reach responses showed parallax-sensitive updating errors: errors increased with depth from fixation and reversed in lateral direction for targets presented at opposite depths from fixation. In a series of control experiments, we ruled out possible biasing factors such as the presence of a fixation light during the translation, the eyes accompanying the hand to the target, and the presence of visual feedback about hand position. Quantitative geometrical analysis confirmed that updating errors were better described by using gaze-centered than gaze-independent coordinates. We conclude that spatial updating for translational motion operates in gaze-centered coordinates. Neural network simulations are presented suggesting that the brain relies on ego-velocity signals and stereoscopic depth and direction information in spatial updating during self-motion.

At some stage in the process of a sensorimotor transformation for a reaching movement, information about the current position of the hand and information about the location of the target must be encoded in the same frame of reference to compute the hand-to-target difference vector. Two main hypotheses have been proposed regarding this reference frame: an eye-centered and a body-centered frame. Here we evaluated these hypotheses using the pointing errors that subjects made when planning and executing arm movements to memorized targets starting from various initial hand positions while keeping gaze fixed in various directions. One group of subjects (n = 10) was tested without visual information about hand position during movement planning (unseen-hand condition); another group (n = 8) was tested with hand and target position simultaneously visible before movement onset (seen-hand condition). We found that both initial hand position and gaze fixation direction had a significant effect on the magnitude and direction of the pointing error. Errors were significantly smaller in the seen-hand condition. For both conditions, though, a reference frame analysis showed that the errors arose at an eye- or hand-centered stage or both, but not at a body-centered stage. As a common reference frame is required to specify a movement vector, these results suggest that an eye-centered mechanism is involved in integrating target and hand position in programming reaching movements. We discuss how simple gain elements modulating the eye-centered target and hand-position signals can account for these results.

The vestibuloocular reflex (VOR) needs to modulate its gain depending on target distance to prevent retinal slip during head movements. We investigated gain modulation (context compensation) for binocular gaze stabilization in human subjects during voluntary yaw and pitch head rotations. Movements of each eye were recorded, both when attempting to maintain gaze on a small visual target at straight-ahead in a darkened room and after its disappearance (remembered target). In the analysis, we relied on a binocular coordinate system yielding a version and a vergence component. We examined how frequency and target distance, approached here by using vergence angle, affected the gain and phase of the version component of the VOR and compared the results to the requirements for ideal performance. Linear regression analysis on the version gain-vergence relationship yielded a slope representing the influence of target proximity and an intercept corresponding to the response at zero vergence ("default gain"). The slope of the fitted relationship, divided by the geometrically required slope, provided a measure for the quality of version context compensation ("context gain"). In both yaw and pitch experiments, we found default version gains close to one even for the remembered target condition, indicating that the active VOR for far targets is already close to ideal without visual support. In near target experiments, the presence of visual feedback yielded near unity context gains, indicating close to optimal performance (retinal slip <0.4 degrees /s). For remembered targets, the context gain deteriorated but was still superior to performance in corresponding passive studies reported in the literature. In general, context compensation in the remembered target paradigm was better for vertical than for horizontal head rotations. The phase delay of version eye velocity relative to head velocity was small (approximately 2 degrees) for both horizontal and vertical head movements. Analysis of the vergence data from the near target experiments showed that context compensation took into account that the two eyes require slightly different VORs. In the DISCUSSION, comparison of the present default VOR gains and context gains with data from earlier passive studies has led us to propose a limited role for efference copies during self-generated movements. We also discuss how our analysis can provide a framework for evaluating two different hypotheses for the generation of binocular VOR eye movements.