Primary Faculty

Stephen Lisberger

Sensory-motor transformations and motor learning in eye movements

Research Description

We use eye movements as a model system for studying several general properties of brain function.  Our work is done on awake, behaviorally trained rhesus monkeys and involves quantitative measurements of eye movement, recordings of the activity of single neurons in many brain regions, quantitative analysis of data, and computational modeling.  We are trying to understand the basic organization of motor circuits, the decoding of visual population responses for control of movement, and the neural basis of motor learning.

We study two kinds of eye movements: the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR), which responses to head turns and causes eye movements that stabilize the eyes in space; and smooth pursuit eye movements, which respond to moving targets and attempt to keep the eye moving at the same velocity as the target.  Both kinds of movements involve sensory-motor transformations to create command signals for accurate and precise movement, and both movements are subject to motor learning.  We are studying many of the brain areas that control each of these movements, asking how signals are transformed as they move from area to area, and determining how the different components of each movement are controlled by different areas.  Both the VOR and pursuit are subject to motor learning and we are trying to localize the site or sites of learning and to establish how plasticity mechanisms at different sites work during behavioral learning with natural stimuli.  Our goal is to achieve a complete enough description of the neural basis for both movements so that we can develop working computational models that mimic what is known about each system and make predictions for future experiments.

Current Projects

1. Determine the relationship between variation in the population response in MT and variation in the speed and direction of smooth eye movements.

2. Study the relationship between cellular plasticity mechanisms in the cerebellum and behavioral learning in smooth pursuit eye movements and the vestibulo-ocular reflex.

3. Identify the sources of variation in smooth pursuit and vestibulo-ocular reflex behavior.

4. Determine the role of eye movement motor cortex in the generation and learning of smooth pursuit eye movements.

5. Use electrical brain stimulation to explore the interaction of outputs from the frontal motor cortex for pursuit and from visual area MT, looking for non-linear effects that might be a consequence of gain control.

Selected Publications

1. Osborne, L.C., Lisberger, S.G., and Bialek, W. (2005) A sensory source for motor variation. Nature. 437: 412-416. 

2. Priebe, N.J., Lisberger, S.G., and Movshon, J.A. (2006) The neural representation of stimulus speed in macaque primary visual cortex. J. Neurosci. 26: 2941-2950.

3. Ramachandran, R. and Lisberger S.G. (2006) Transformation of vestibular signals into motor commands in the vestibulo-ocular reflex pathways of monkeys. J. Neurophysiol. 96: 1061-1074.

4. Schoppik, D. and Lisberger S.G. (2006) Saccades exert spatial control of motion processing for smooth pursuit eye movements. J. Neurosci. 26: 7607-7618.

5. Medina, J.F. and Lisberger, S.G. (2007) Variation, signal, and noise in cerebellar sensory-motor processing for smooth pursuit eye movements.  J. Neurosci. 27: 6832-6842.

6. Osborne, L.C., Hohl, S.S., Bialek, W., and Lisberger, S.G. (2007) Time course of precision in smooth pursuit eye movements. J. Neurosci. 27: 2987-2998.

7. Schoppik, D., Nagel, K.I., and Lisberger, S.G. (2008) Sparse encoding of smooth eye movement by frontal eye field neurons. Neuron. 58: 248-260.

Contact Information

Email: SGL@phy.ucsf.edu
Phone: 415-476-1062
Mailing Address:
UCSF Mail code 0444
Parnassus Campus
Office: HSE-812
FedEx address: 513 Parnassus Avenue
Room 802A-HSE, UCSF
San Francisco, CA 94143-0444