RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Instantaneous movement-unrelated midbrain activity modifies ongoing eye movements JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 2020.05.31.126359 DO 10.1101/2020.05.31.126359 A1 Antimo Buonocore A1 Matthias P. Baumann A1 Ziad M. Hafed YR 2020 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/01/2020.05.31.126359.abstract AB At any moment in time, new information is sampled from the environment and interacts with ongoing brain state. Often, such interaction takes place within individual circuits that are capable of both mediating the internally ongoing plan as well as representing exogenous sensory events. Here we investigated how sensory-driven neural activity can be integrated, very often in the same neuron types, into ongoing oculomotor commands for saccades. Despite the ballistic nature of saccades, visually-induced action potentials in the superior colliculus (SC), a structure known to drive eye movements, not only occurred intra-saccadically, but they were also associated with highly predictable modifications of the ongoing eye movements. Such modifications were also possible by peri-saccadically injecting single, double, or triple electrical microstimulation pulses into the SC. Our results suggest instantaneous readout of the SC map during movement generation, irrespective of activity source, and explain a significant component of kinematic variability of motor outputs.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.