RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Parametric information about eye movements is sent to the ears
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2022.11.27.518089
DO 10.1101/2022.11.27.518089
A1 Lovich, Stephanie N
A1 King, Cynthia D
A1 Murphy, David LK
A1 Landrum, Rachel
A1 Shera, Christopher A
A1 Groh, Jennifer M
YR 2022
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/11/27/2022.11.27.518089.abstract
AB Eye movements alter the relationship between the visual and auditory spatial scenes. Signals related to eye movements affect neural pathways from the ear through auditory cortex and beyond, but how these signals contribute to computing the locations of sounds with respect to the visual scene is poorly understood. Here, we evaluated the information contained in eye movement-related eardrum oscillations (EMREOs), pressure changes recorded in the ear canal that occur in conjunction with simultaneous eye movements. We show that EMREOs contain parametric information about horizontal and vertical eye displacement as well as initial/final eye position with respect to the head. The parametric information in the horizontal and vertical directions combines linearly, allowing accurate prediction of the EMREOs associated with oblique eye movements from their respective horizontal and vertical components. Target location can also be inferred from the EMREO signals recorded during eye movements to those targets. We hypothesize that the thus-far unknown mechanism underlying EMREOs could impose a two-dimensional eye-movement related transfer function on any incoming sound, permitting subsequent processing stages to compute the positions of sounds in relation to the visual scene.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.