Population coding of distinct categories of behavior in the frontal eye field

We investigated how the frontal eye field (FEF) encodes smooth pursuit, pursuit suppression, and saccade in monkeys. Tuning curves were highly correlated between pursuit and suppression, but the correlation was much weaker in pursuit and saccade. Pursuit and saccade occupied orthogonal subspaces, indicating independent tuning, whereas pursuit and suppression overlapped substantially, emphasizing the predominance of visual motion in pursuit encoding. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying the FEF's ability to control multiple behaviors.