Motor learning in the saccadic oculomotor system revealed through fMRI

Understanding how the brain learns an oculomotor task will provide insight to the fundamental mechanism by which the brain performs numerous motor control tasks. The saccadic system, which is responsible for directing our visual attention from one object to another in two dimensional space, exhibits extraordinary speed and accuracy. It has been shown that when a person learns how a target stimulus will change, the oculomotor system's latency decreases and the peak velocity increases. This study used the saccadic system as the model to analyze where in the brain the mechanism associated with oculomotor learning is located. Studies were performed in a 3T Siemans Magnetron MRI system using a box car protocol. The data were analyzed using AFNI. Preliminary data suggest that the activity was similar in the two people studied and is present in the primary visual cortex (V1), the middle temporal area (V5), and the frontal cortex. Based on the experimental protocol there is an increase in activity when the subject could predict the stimulus protocol based on learning, suggesting an increase in activity during this portion of the task.