Optimal Control of Saccades by Spatial-Temporal Activity Patterns in the Monkey Superior Colliculus

A major challenge in computational neurobiology is to understand how populations of noisy, broadly-tuned neurons produce accurate goal-directed actions such as saccades. Saccades are high-velocity eye movements that have stereotyped, nonlinear kinematics; their duration increases with amplitude, while peak eye-velocity saturates for large saccades. Recent theories suggest that these characteristics reflect a deliberate strategy that optimizes a speed-accuracy tradeoff in the presence of signal-dependent noise in the neural control signals. Here we argue that the midbrain superior colliculus (SC), a key sensorimotor interface that contains a topographically-organized map of saccade vectors, is in an ideal position to implement such an optimization principle. Most models attribute the nonlinear saccade kinematics to saturation in the brainstem pulse generator downstream from the SC. However, there is little data to support this assumption. We now present new neurophysiological evidence for an alternative scheme, which proposes that these properties reside in the spatial-temporal dynamics of SC activity. As predicted by this scheme, we found a remarkably systematic organization in the burst properties of saccade-related neurons along the rostral-to-caudal (i.e., amplitude-coding) dimension of the SC motor map: peak firing-rates systematically decrease for cells encoding larger saccades, while burst durations and skewness increase, suggesting that this spatial gradient underlies the increase in duration and skewness of the eye velocity profiles with amplitude. We also show that all neurons in the recruited population synchronize their burst profiles, indicating that the burst-timing of each cell is determined by the planned saccade vector in which it participates, rather than by its anatomical location. Together with the observation that saccade-related SC cells indeed show signal-dependent noise, this precisely tuned organization of SC burst activity strongly supports the notion of an optimal motor-control principle embedded in the SC motor map as it fully accounts for the straight trajectories and kinematic nonlinearity of saccades. Author Summary: As the fovea is the only spot on the retina with high spatial resolution, primates need to move their eyes to peripheral targets for detailed inspection. Saccades are the fastest movements of the body, and theoretical studies suggest that their trajectories are optimized to bring the fovea as fast and accurately as possible on target. Speed-accuracy optimization principles explain the stereotyped nonlinear ‘main-sequence’ relationship between saccade amplitude, duration, and peak velocity. Earlier models attributed these kinematic properties to nonlinear neural circuitry in the brainstem but this creates problems for oblique saccades. Here, we demonstrate how the brainstem can be linear, and how instead the midbrain superior colliculus (SC) could optimize saccadic speed-accuracy tradeoff. Each saccade involves the recruitment of a large population of SC neurons. We show that peak firing-rate and burst shape of the recruited cells systematically vary with their location in the SC, and that burst shapes nicely match the eye-velocity profiles. This organization of burst properties fully explains the main-sequence. Moreover, all cells synchronize their bursts, thus maximizing the total instantaneous input to the brainstem, and ensuring that oblique saccades have straight trajectories. We thus discovered a sophisticated neural mechanism underlying optimal motor control in the brain.