Independent components of oculomotor learning

This research is an investigation of the visual circuit for saccadic and vergence eye movements using an oculomotor learning task to study the cerebral and cerebellar areas utilizing fMRI. Data from eight subjects were analyzed with analysis of functional neural images (AFNI) and the Infomax independent component analysis algorithm. This study showed that 1) neural activation is present in the prefrontal, frontal, parietal, occipital cortices, and cerebellar vermis (4/5) and cerebellar vermis (VI/VII) or declive for saccadic and vergence eye movements and 2) there are two distinct pathways involved in an oculomotor learning task. The first is a frontal-parietal and the second is cerebellar (VI/VII) pathway, for short-term oculomotor learning. These findings suggest that oculomotor learning utilizes two distinct circuits to learn a visual stimulus pattern.