The Journal of Neurophysiology Vol. 82 No. 2 August 1999, pp. 955-962
Copyright ©1999 by the American Physiological Society

Kinematics of Eye Movements of Cats to Broadband Acoustic Targets

 ¹Neuroscience Training Program and  ²Department of Physiology, University of Wisconsin, Madison Wisconsin 53706

Populin, Luis C. and Tom C. T. Yin. Kinematics of Eye Movements of Cats to Broadband Acoustic Targets. J. Neurophysiol. 82: 955-962, 1999. Operant conditioning was used to train cats with their heads immobilized to localize sound by directing their eyes to the location of the sources. The kinematics of those eye movements were studied and compared with eye movements to visual targets at the same locations. The main finding of this study is that eye movements to broadband long-duration acoustic targets have two components: an initial slow phase of variable duration and a fast, normal saccade. The slow component is characterized by a persistent, shallow velocity ramp, while the saccadic component of the response falls on the main sequence computed from eye movements to visual targets. The slow component was shorter before saccades to long-duration stimuli performed under the delayed-saccade task and practically absent before saccades to transient acoustic stimuli. The results suggest that the initial slow component is used by cats to deal with uncertainty associated with the location of long-duration broadband targets and that the input to the saccade integrator(s) is similar under both visual and acoustic conditions.