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Evidence for Peak-Shaped Gaze Fields in Area V6A: Implications for Sensorimotor Transformations in Reaching Tasks

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Book cover Bioinspired Applications in Artificial and Natural Computation (IWINAC 2009)

Abstract

The area V6A of the medial parieto-occipital cortex of the macaque is studied for gaze sensitivity. The reported experimental observations support the computational theory of the gain fields to produce a distributed representation of the real position of targets in head-centered coordinates. Although it was originally pointed out that the majority of the cells exhibit roughly linear gain fields [1] [2], we have verified that the peak-shaped gaze fields reported in this study are not in contrast with the gain field models developed in the theoretical neuroscience literature [3] [4]. Rather, the use of peak-shaped (e.g., non monotonic) gaze fields even improves the efficiency of the coding scheme by reducing the number of units that are necessary to encode the target position.

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Breveglieri, R., Bosco, A., Canessa, A., Fattori, P., Sabatini, S.P. (2009). Evidence for Peak-Shaped Gaze Fields in Area V6A: Implications for Sensorimotor Transformations in Reaching Tasks. In: Mira, J., Ferrández, J.M., Álvarez, J.R., de la Paz, F., Toledo, F.J. (eds) Bioinspired Applications in Artificial and Natural Computation. IWINAC 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5602. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02267-8_35

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02267-8_35

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-02266-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-02267-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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