One of our main goals was to obtain saccade-free initiation of pursuit. Therefore, we aimed our electrodes at the representation of the central visual field and recorded mainly from neurons with

receptive field centers within 5 degrees of the fovea. Because our data analysis was limited to the first 200 ms after the onset of target motion, we were not concerned about the exact position of the eye relative to the moving patch of dots during steady-state pursuit. In a typical experiment, trials that presented four to six different directions or speeds of stimulus motion were interleaved randomly in a block of trials. To prevent anticipatory pursuit responses, each FXR agonist stimulus motion was balanced by a companion trial that delivered stimulus motion at the same speed in the opposite direction. Monkeys received fluid selleck kinase inhibitor reward for keeping their eyes within

3°–5° of target position throughout the pursuit portion of the trial. The exact fixation requirement depended on the speed and the size of the pursuit target as well as the starting location of the patch relative to the fixation target. Monkeys usually completed 2,000–3,600 pursuit trials in each daily experiment. We used a Mini-Matrix 05 microdrive (Thomas Recording, Giessen, Germany) to lower up to five quartz-shielded tungsten electrodes into the brain. Extrastriate area MT was identified based on stereotaxic coordinates, directional and speed response properties of neurons, receptive field sizes, retinotopic organization, and surrounding cortical areas (Desimone and Ungerleider, 1986 and Maunsell oxyclozanide and Van Essen, 1983). Neural signals were amplified and digitized for on-line spike sorting and spikes were initially assigned to single neurons by a template-matching algorithm (Plexon MAP, Plexon Inc.). After the experiment, we used a combination of visual inspection

of waveforms, projection onto principal components, template-matching, and refractory period violations in Offline Sorter (Plexon Inc.) to assign spikes to well-isolated single units. Waveforms were time-stamped with 1 ms precision and firing rates were obtained by convolving spike trains with a Gaussian window with a standard deviation of 10 ms. Eye velocity signals were created with an analog differentiator circuit, and eye position and velocity signals were sampled and stored at 1,000 Hz. Velocity traces were smoothed with a zero-phase, 25 Hz, 2-pole digital Butterworth filter. To allow study of the speed and direction tuning of each cell, the monkey fixated a stationary spot and stimuli moved across the receptive field in 300 ms intervals.