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Tirin Moore

Publications and source records attributed to Tirin Moore.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2004

Visually guided behavior after V1 lesions in young and adult monkeys and its relation to blindsight in humans.

After lesions of striate cortex in primates, there is still the capacity to detect and localize visual stimuli. In this chapter we review three aspects of our study of this phenomenon in macaques. First, we found that macaques that received their striate lesions as infants had considerably greater ability to detect and localize stimuli than those that received similar lesions as adults. Second, we suggest that the visual functions that survive striate lesions in macaques made in adulthood resemble those in human 'blindsight'. Third, we report that monkeys with striate lesions made in infancy are able to discriminate direction of visual motion.

Aging↗
PubMed2003

Visuomotor origins of covert spatial attention.

Covert spatial attention produces biases in perceptual performance and neural processing of behaviorally relevant stimuli in the absence of overt orienting movements. The neural mechanism that gives rise to these effects is poorly understood. This paper surveys past evidence of a relationship between oculomotor control and visual spatial attention and more recent evidence of a causal link between the control of saccadic eye movements by frontal cortex and covert visual selection. Both suggest that the mechanism of covert spatial attention emerges as a consequence of the reciprocal interactions between neural circuits primarily involved in specifying the visual properties of potential targets and those involved in specifying the movements needed to fixate them.

Animals↗
PubMed2003

Microstimulation of the frontal eye field and its effects on covert spatial attention.

Many studies have established that the strength of visual perception and the strength of visual representations within visual cortex vary according to the focus of covert spatial attention. While it is clear that attention can modulate visual signals, the source of this modulation remains unknown. We have examined the possibility that saccade related mechanisms provide a source of spatial attention by studying the effects of electrical microstimulation of the frontal eye fields (FEF) on spatial attention. Monkeys performed a task in which they had to detect luminance changes of a peripheral target while ignoring a flashing distracter. The target luminance change could be preceded by stimulation of the FEF at current levels below that which evoked saccadic eye movements. We found that when the target change was preceded by stimulation of FEF, the monkey could detect smaller changes in target luminance. The increased sensitivity to the target change only occurred when the target was placed in the part of the visual field represented by neurons at the stimulation site. The magnitude of improvement depended on the temporal asynchrony of the stimulation onset and the target event. No significant effect of stimulation was observed when long intervals (>300 ms) between stimulation and the target event were used, and the magnitude of the increased sensitivity decreased systematically with increasing asynchrony. At the shortest asynchrony, FEF stimulation temporally overlapped the target event and the magnitude of the improvement was comparable to that of removing the distracter from the task. These results demonstrate that transient, but potent improvements in the deployment of covert spatial attention can be obtained by microstimulation of FEF sites from which saccadic eye movements are also evoked.

Animals↗
PubMed2003

Complex movements evoked by microstimulation of the ventral intraparietal area.

Most neurons in the ventral intraparietal area (VIP) of the macaque brain respond to both visual and tactile stimuli. The tactile receptive field is usually on the face, and the visual receptive field usually corresponds spatially to the tactile receptive field. In this study, electrical microstimulation of VIP, but not of surrounding tissue, caused a constellation of movements including eye closure, facial grimacing, head withdrawal, elevation of the shoulder, and movements of the hand to the space beside the head or shoulder. A similar set of movements was evoked by an air puff to the monkey's cheek. One interpretation is that VIP contributes to defensive movements triggered by stimuli on or near the head.

Animals↗
PubMed2003

Selective gating of visual signals by microstimulation of frontal cortex.

Several decades of psychophysical and neurophysiological studies have established that visual signals are enhanced at the locus of attention. What remains a mystery is the mechanism that initiates biases in the strength of visual representations. Recent evidence argues that, during spatial attention, these biases reflect nascent saccadic eye movement commands. We examined the functional interaction of saccade preparation and visual coding by electrically stimulating sites within the frontal eye fields (FEF) and measuring its effect on the activity of neurons in extrastriate visual cortex. Here we show that visual responses in area V4 could be enhanced after brief stimulation of retinotopically corresponding sites within the FEF using currents below that needed to evoke saccades. The magnitude of the enhancement depended on the effectiveness of receptive field stimuli as well as on the presence of competing stimuli outside the receptive field. Stimulation of non-corresponding FEF representations could suppress V4 responses. The results suggest that the gain of visual signals is modified according to the strength of spatially corresponding eye movement commands.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed2002

The cortical control of movement revisited.

Recently, we found that electrical stimulation of motor cortex caused monkeys to make coordinated, complex movements. These evoked movements were arranged across the cortex in a map of spatial locations to which the hand moved. We suggest that some of the subdivisions previously described within primary motor and premotor cortex may represent different types of actions that monkeys tend to make in different regions of space. According to this view, primary and premotor cortex may fit together into a larger map of manual space.

Animals↗
PubMed2002

Complex movements evoked by microstimulation of precentral cortex.

Electrical microstimulation was used to study primary motor and premotor cortex in monkeys. Each stimulation train was 500 ms in duration, approximating the time scale of normal reaching and grasping movements and the time scale of the neuronal activity that normally accompanies movement. This stimulation on a behaviorally relevant time scale evoked coordinated, complex postures that involved many joints. For example, stimulation of one site caused the mouth to open and also caused the hand to shape into a grip posture and move to the mouth. Stimulation of this site always drove the joints toward this final posture, regardless of the direction of movement required to reach the posture. Stimulation of other cortical sites evoked different postures. Postures that involved the arm were arranged across cortex to form a map of hand positions around the body. This stimulation-evoked map encompassed both primary motor and the adjacent premotor cortex. We suggest that these regions fit together into a single map of the workspace around the body.

Animals↗