Gating of Retinal Transmission by Afferent Eye Position and Movement Signals

Vision in most vertebrates is an active process that requires the brain to combine retinal signals with information about eye movement. Eye movement information may feed forward from the motor control areas of the brain or feed back from the extrinsic eye muscles. Feedback signals elicited by passive eye movement selectively gate retinal outflow at the first relay, the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus. The gating predominantly facilitates retinogeniculate transmission immediately after eye movement and inhibits transmission when a new steady-state eye position is achieved. These two gating effects are distributed in a complementary fashion across the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus such that the spatiotemporal activity profile could contribute to object detection and localization.