Life Sciences Commons^™

Role Of Anterior Cingulate Cortex In Saccade Control, Sahand Babapoor-Farrokhran

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cognitive control is referred to the guidance of behavior based on internal goals rather than external stimuli. It has been postulated that prefrontal cortex is mainly involved in higher order cognitive functions. Specifically, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which is part of the prefrontal cortex, is suggested to be involved in performance monitoring and conflict monitoring that are considered to be cognitive control functions.

Saccades are the fast eye movements that align the fovea on the objects of interest in the environment. In this thesis, I have explored the role of ACC in control of saccadic eye movements. First, I performed …

Contribution Of The Primate Frontal Cortex To Eye Movements And Neuronal Activity In The Superior Colliculus, Tyler R. Peel

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Humans and non-human primates must precisely align the eyes on an object to view it with high visual acuity. An important role of the oculomotor system is to generate accurate eye movements, such as saccades, toward a target. Given that each eye has only six muscles that rotate the eye in three degrees of freedom, this relatively simple volitional movement has allowed researchers to well-characterize the brain areas involved in their generation. In particular, the midbrain Superior Colliculus (SC), is recognized as having a primary role in the generation of visually-guided saccades via the integration of sensory and cognitive information. …