The Neurobiology of Saccadic Eye Movements

The past decade has seen rapid advances in our understanding of the neurobiology of saccadic eye movements. This multiauthored volume, the third in a series devoted to oculomotor research, provides an excellent, comprehensive review of recent work in the field. Part I describes the physical characteristics of saccades and then discusses various models put forth to explain them. Part II summarizes the neural structures involved in the generation of saccades, with individual chapters covering the brain stem, tectum, basal ganglia, cerebral cortex, pulvinar, thalamus, and cerebellum. Each review is clearly organized, informative, and extensively referenced. The reader must cope with a fair amount of modeling jargon, but the prose is palatable. The chapter on brain-stem regions related to saccade generation is excessively long. Perhaps a separate chapter on the neurology of saccade deficits resulting from clinical and experimental lesions would have been a good idea. Saccadic eye movements are popular