Saccade planning evokes topographically specific activity in the dorsal and ventral streams.
Saccade planning may invoke spatially-specific feedback signals that bias early visual activity in favor of top-down goals. We tested this hypothesis by measuring cortical activity at the early stages of the dorsal and ventral visual processing streams. Human subjects maintained saccade plans to (prosaccade) or away (antisaccade) from a spatial location over long memory-delays. Results show that cortical activity persists in early visual cortex at the retinotopic location of upcoming saccade goals. Topographically specific activity persists as early as V1, and activity increases along both dorsal (V3A/B, IPS0) and ventral (hV4, VO1) visual areas. Importantly, activity persists when saccade goals are available only via working memory and when visual targets and saccade goals are spatially disassociated. We conclude that top-down signals elicit retinotopically specific activity in visual cortex both in the dorsal and ventral streams. Such activity may underlie mechanisms that prioritize locations of task-relevant objects.
['Saber|Golbarg T|GT|', 'Pestilli|Franco|F|http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2469-0494', 'Curtis|Clayton E|CE|']
D000328:Adult D001931:Brain Mapping D005260:Female D006801:Humans D008297:Male D008568:Memory D010775:Photic Stimulation D011597:Psychomotor Performance D012438:Saccades D014793:Visual Cortex D014795:Visual Pathways
saccade antisaccade working memory fMRI retinotopy spatial cognition