The frontal eye field (FEF) has been implicated as a possible participant in attentional allocation. Recent studies have found that low-current stimulation of FEF results in enhanced attention and increased visual responses in extrastriate visual area V4. We investigated the necessity of FEF function for allocating attention by unilaterally inactivating FEF in two monkeys and testing the monkeys ability on a two-alternative forced-choice saccade task. This task was designed to spatially dissociate two processes which we assessed separately: discrimination of a visual cue and generation of a saccade. Following inactivation, we determined the extent of contralesional saccadic deficits, compared to contralesional discrimination deficits, using a choice-based analysis and a reaction time (RT)-based analysis. Overall, we found that unilateral inactivation had an impact on contralesional saccadic performance corresponding to a 61.7-ms overall change in RT and a 34% change in choice probability. On the other hand, we discovered only a 7.0-ms overall change in RT and a 0% change in choice probability with respect to contralesional visual discrimination ability. We conclude that FEF function is much more important for saccadic generation than attentional allocation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-11282005-134314 |
| Date | 20 March 2006 |
| Creators | Sather, Brittanie Lee |
| Contributors | Tai Sing Lee, Neeraj Gandhi, Carl Colby, Carl Olson, Peter Strick, Marc Sommer |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-11282005-134314/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
Page generated in 0.019 seconds