Target motions at different selleck chemicals speeds or directions cause peak responses in different MT neurons. MT provides the sensory drive for the system we study, smooth pursuit eye movements (Newsome et al., 1985, Groh et al., 1997 and Born et al., 2000). In the motor pathways for pursuit,

the representation of the desired eye motion is quite different from that in MT. In cerebellar neurons that are two synapses removed from the extraocular motoneurons, eye direction is determined by the relative firing of neurons that prefer horizontal versus vertical eye motion; eye speed is determined by the absolute firing rate of all neurons (Krauzlis and Lisberger, 1996). Thus, one of the major challenges faced by the pursuit circuit, and see more all sensory-motor behaviors, is to “read-out” or “decode” the sensory population response in a way that transforms sensory representations into the coordinate system of the muscles. The readout is continuous in the sense that it attempts to match eye velocity to whatever target velocity is present, rather than

making a forced-choice decision among a small number of speeds and/or directions (Lisberger and Westbrook, 1985 and Osborne et al., 2005). The initiation of pursuit uses the population response in area MT to estimate target velocity: T⇀=f(rMT). The estimate of target velocity then is converted to commands for pursuit, possibly with some added noise: E⇀=T⇀+ξ. Our previous work has led to the hypothesis of a sensory origin for most of the variation in the initiation of pursuit (Osborne et al.,

2005, Osborne et al., 2007 and Medina and Lisberger, 2007), with little or no noise,ξξ, added after sensory estimation. Sensory noise exists because correlations between Sitaxentan the responses of individual MT neurons limit noise reduction by pooling across the population (Shadlen et al., 1996 and Huang and Lisberger, 2009). One goal of the present paper was to provide a critical test of the hypothesis of a sensory origin to motor noise. If the hypothesis is true, then the trial-by-trial variation in responses of individual MT neurons should be correlated with the variation in the initiation of pursuit: there should be strong “MT-pursuit” correlations. The hypothesis also predicts that the trial-by-trial variance of pursuit initiation should be only modestly smaller than the trial-by-trial variance of the responses of MT neurons, because of the limits on noise reduction. Our data satisfy both of these predictions, providing strong, direct support for the hypothesis of a sensory origin for at least some of the variation in pursuit initiation. Our findings in pursuit initiation imply generality for the suggestion that much of the variation in arm movements (Churchland et al.