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Original Research Article
Sequential activation of human oculomotor centers during planning of visually-guided eye movements: a combined fMRI-MEG study.

1  I.T.A.B. Institute for Advanced Biomedical Technologies, "G. D`Annunzio" University Foundation, Italy
2  Department of Clinical Sciences and Bioimages, “G. d’Annunzio” University, Italy
3  Department of Neurology, Washington University School of Medicine, USA


We used magneto-encephalography (MEG) to measure visually evoked activity in healthy volunteers performing saccadic eye movements to visual targets. The neuromagnetic activity was analyzed from regions of cortical activation identifi ed in separate functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. The latency of visual responses signifi cantly increased from the Middle Temporal region (MT+) to the Intraparietal Sulcus (IPS) to the Frontal Eye Field (FEF), and their amplitude was greater in the hemisphere contralateral to the visual target. Trial-to-trial variability of oculomotor reaction times correlated with visual response latency across cortical areas. These results support a feedforward recruitment of oculomotor cortical centers by visual information, and a model in which behavioral variability depends on variability at different neural stages of processing.

Keywords: saccades, fMRI, MEG, reaction time variability, visual latency

Citation: Sestieri C, Pizzella V, Cianflone F, Romani GL and Corbetta M (2008) Sequential activation of human oculomotor centers during planning of visually-guided eye movements: a combined fMRI-MEG study. Front. Hum. Neurosci. (2007) 1:1. doi:10.3389/neuro.09.001.2007

Received: 29 August 2007; paper pending published: 29 November 2007; accepted: 03 January 2008; published online: 28 March 2008.

Edited by: 
Robert T. Knight, University of California Berkeley, USA

Reviewed by: 
Gregory McCarthy, Yale University, USA
Marty G. Woldorff, Duke University, USA

Copyright: © 2008 Sestieri, Pizzella, Cianflone, Romani and Corbetta. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence: Carlo Sestieri, I.T.A.B. Institute for Advanced Biomedical Technologies, “G. d’Annunzio” University Foundation; Department of Clinical Sciences and Bioimages, “G. d’Annunzio” University, Via dei Vestini 33, 66013 Chieti, Italy. e-mail: sestieric@npg.wustl.edu

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