Biology subjects

Hauser, C. K.

Publications and source records attributed to Hauser, C. K..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Frontal Eye Field Leads a Distributed Oculomotor Circuit for Abstract Categorical Decisions

Flexible decisions require the brain to transform sensory evidence into abstract, task-relevant variables and then into actions. Understanding this process requires identifying how distributed neural populations represent sensory, cognitive, and motor variables, and how interareal interactions mediate transformations between them. We simultaneously recorded population activity in frontal eye field (FEF), lateral intraparietal area (LIP) and superior colliculus (SC) while monkeys performed a flexible yet urgent visual motion-categorization task. Within this network, FEF first encoded abstract categories, followed by SC and then LIP. LIP showed the earliest encoding of visual stimulus features, but a later encoding of upcoming saccades. Single-trial analyses revealed directed information flow from FEF to LIP populations for category-and choice-related signals. Reversible FEF inactivation impaired categorization and saccadic choice, causally implicating FEF in category-guided action. These findings reveal a differentiated FEF-LIP-SC circuit for transforming sensory evidence into abstract categorical decisions and the actions used to report them.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Urgency reveals an attentional vortex during antisaccade performance

In the antisaccade task, which is considered a sensitive assay of cognitive function, a salient visual cue appears and the participant must look away from it. This requires sensory, motor-planning, and cognitive neural mechanisms. But what are the unique contributions of these mechanisms to performance, and when exactly are they engaged? By introducing an urgency requirement into the antisaccade task, we track the evolution of the choice process with millisecond resolution and find a singular, nonlinear dependence on cue exposure: when viewed briefly ([~]100-140 ms), the cue captures attention so powerfully that looking at it (erroneously) is virtually inevitable, but as the cue viewing time increases, the probability of success quickly rises and saturates. The psychophysical and modeling results reveal concerted interactions between reflexive and voluntary cognitive mechanisms that (1) unfold extremely rapidly, (2) are qualitatively consistent across participants, and (3) are nevertheless quantitatively distinctive of each individuals perceptual capacities

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

Motor selection dynamics in FEF explain the reaction time variance of saccades to single targets

In studies of voluntary movement, a most elemental quantity is the reaction time (RT) between the onset of a visual stimulus and a saccade toward it. However, this RT demonstrates extremely high variability, which in spite of extensive research remains unexplained. It is well established that, when a visual target appears, oculomotor activity gradually builds up until a critical level is reached, at which point a saccade is triggered. Here, we further characterize the dynamics of this rise-to-threshold process based on computational work and single-neuron recordings from the frontal eye field (FEF) of behaving monkeys. We find that the baseline activity, build-up rate, and threshold level show strong, nonlinear co-dependencies that explain the distinct RT distributions observed experimentally. The results indicate that intrinsic randomness contributes little to saccade variance, which results mainly from an intricate, fundamentally deterministic mechanism of motor conflict resolution that has subtle yet highly characteristic manifestations.

neuroscience↗