Rhythmic entrainment of saccadic eye-movements in macaque FEF

Abstract

Saccadic eye movements play a key role in gaining information about the surrounding environment. However, the neural mechanisms underlying the timing of these eye movements remain poorly understood. Here, we investigated the entrainment of saccadic eye movement by oscillatory neural activities in rhesus monkeys performing a visual foraging task. We found that saccades are phase-locked to beta LFP oscillations (16-22 Hz) in the frontal eye field (FEF), 100 ms before saccade onset, supporting a causal role of these oscillations in saccade timing. Furthermore, we show that the alignment between saccades and FEF LFPs varies, depending on the spatial relationship between the saccade target and the response field (RF) of neurons in the FEF. These findings suggest that the phase of the oscillatory neural activities determines the timing and direction of saccades.