Chapter 3 – Executive Contributions to Eye Movement Control

Publisher Summary The studies discussed in the chapter suggest that executive control processes are a sleeping partner to more automatic mechanisms that take over once environment–behavior associations are learned. The function of executive control is to monitor this automatic system to ensure that behavior remains compatible with high-level goals. It is only when motor and sensory feedback conflicts with expectations based on these goals that direct top-down control must intervene. Recent neurophysiological evidence suggests that attention can be viewed as a “race” among firing rates of different neuronal populations, selectively tuned for different attributes of an organism's environment. In this regard, frontal areas are assumed to provide a tonic biasing signal onto neurons coding for a sensory feature of interest. Investigations in patients with frontal lobe damage suggest that the frontal cerebral cortex is important for monitoring biased competitive interactions as well as exerting top-down control. Frontal areas also monitor recent behavior and use information to make predictions about future actions and expected sensory and motor feedback. It is only when these predictions are breached that frontal regions adaptively bias neural competition toward new associative mappings.