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Madeleine Schlag-Rey

Publications and source records attributed to Madeleine Schlag-Rey.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Primate antisaccade. II. Supplementary eye field neuronal activity predicts correct performance.

Neuronal activities were recorded in the supplementary eye field (SEF) of 3 macaque monkeys trained to perform antisaccades pseudorandomly interleaved with prosaccades, as instructed by the shape of a central fixation point. The prosaccade goal was indicated by a peripheral stimulus flashed anywhere on the screen, whereas the antisaccade goal was an unmarked site diametrically opposite the flashed stimulus. The visual cue was given immediately after the instruction cue disappeared in the immediate-saccade task, or during the instruction period in the delayed-saccade task. The instruction cue offset was the saccade gosignal. Here we focus on 92 task-related neurons: visual, eye-movement, and instruction/fixation neurons. We found that 73% of SEF eye-movement-related neurons fired significantly more before anti-saccades than prosaccades. This finding was analyzed at 3 levels: population, single neuron, and individual trial. On individual antisaccade trials, 40 ms before saccade, the firing rate of eye-movement-related neurons was highly predictive of successful performance. A similar analysis of visual responses (40 ms astride the peak) gave less-coherent results. Fixation neurons, activated during the initial instruction period (i.e., after the instruction cue but before the stimulus) always fired more on antisaccade than on prosaccade trials. This trend, however, was statistically significant for only half of these neurons. We conclude that the SEF is critically involved in the production of antisaccades.

Animals↗

Voluntary action expands perceived duration of its sensory consequence.

When we look at a clock with a hand showing seconds, the hand sometimes appears to stay longer at its first-seen position than at the following positions, evoking an illusion of chronostasis. This illusory extension of perceived duration has been shown to be coupled to saccadic eye movement and it has been suggested to serve as a mechanism of maintaining spatial stability across the saccade. Here, we examined the effects of three kinds of voluntary movements on the illusion of chronostasis: key press, voice command, and saccadic eye movement. We found that the illusion can occur with all three kinds of voluntary movements if such movements start the clock immediately. When a delay is introduced between the voluntary movement and the start of the clock, the delay itself is overestimated. These results indicate that the illusion of chronostasis is not specific to saccadic eye movement, and may therefore involve a more general mechanism of how voluntary action influences time perception.

Adult↗

Spatial localization precedes temporal determination in visual perception.

The temporal order of two spots of light successively appearing in the dark, just before a saccade, influences their perceived spatial relation. Both spots are mislocalized in the saccade direction--the second more so than the first--because mislocalization grows as time elapses from stimulus to saccade onset. On the other hand, the perceived order of the two spots may be altered if the second spot is at the focus of spatial attention. How would these illusory perceptions of space and time interact when they are brought to play together? Could they be independent or could one perception depend on the other? Here we show that perceived location of stimuli is not affected by illusory temporal order, whereas perceived temporal order is affected by misperceived location. The results suggest that the brain processes spatial location of visual stimuli before processing their temporal order.

Attention↗