Summary
Single unit recordings were obtained from the regions of the III, IV, and VI nucleus in the brainstem of alert macaques together with EOG recordings for vertical and horizontal eye positions. A quantitative analysis of the static characteristics for eye position versus impulse rate showed that: 1. the impulse rate corresponding to a given eye position during fixation is about 15 imp./sec larger if this position was reached by a saccade in the on-direction (impulse rate increase) rather than in the off-direction. This feature is called ‘static hysteresis’; 2. no neuron with an opposite behaviour was found; 3. the correlation coefficients for samples taken within 30 sec were υ>0.9 for characteristics in the three cases: on-direction values only, off-direction values only, on- and off-direction values together. This static hysteresis is possibly a general feature of reciprocally innervated motor systems which have to compensate for mechanical friction, play and for viscoelastic elements.
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A short abstract of this paper was published in: Pflügers Arch.347, R 122 (1974) (abstract).
Supported in part by the National Eye Institute, U.S. Public Health Service under Grant EY-00592 to Dr. G. Westheimer and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
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Eckmiller, R. Hysteresis in the static characteristics of eye position coded neurons in the alert monkey. Pflugers Arch. 350, 249–258 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00587804
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00587804