Remapping of visual space in primate frontal eye field

Primates can make accurate sequential saccades to rapidly flashed targets despite, in the case of an intervening saccade, dissonance between the retinal location of a target and the vector of the saccade necessary to acquire that target. The saccadic system must therefore be able to plan and execute trajectories incorporating the metric of the intervening saccade. When shown stimuli that will be brought into their visual receptive fields by a saccade, 33% of visually responsive neurons in the frontal eye fields (FEF) produce predictive responses: they fire before the stimuli reach their visual receptive fields. Also, when shown stimuli that have recently vanished, a majority (59%) of these FEF visually responsive neurons carry a short term memory trace of the recently vanished stimuli when the locations of these stimuli are brought into their receptive fields. This group of neurons also has an intertrial memory trace associated with the spatial location of stimuli, in recent trials, which have been shown in the receptive field of the neurons. These neurons are used by the FEF to account for dynamic motor situations by remapping the visual world through neuronal mechanisms.