paper available

[Lina Massone]

Preprints of the following paper are available upon request:

	A Neural-Network System for Control of Eye Movements:
			Basic Mechanisms

	 		Lina L.E. Massone

		(to appear in Biological Cybernetics)

Abstract:

This paper presents a neural-network-based system that can generate and control
movements of the eyes. It is inspired on a number of experimental
observations on the saccadic and gaze systems of monkeys and cats.
Because of the generality of the approach undertaken, the system
can be regarded as a demonstration of how parallel distributed
processing principles, namely learning and attractor dynamics,
can be integrated with experimental findings, as well as a 
biologically-inspired controller for a dexterous robotic 
orientation device. The system is composed of three parts: a dynamic
motor map, a push-pull circuitry, and a plant. The dynamics of the
motor map is generated by a multi-layer network that was trained to
compute a bidimensional temporal-spatial transformation.
Simulation results indicate (i) that the system is able to reproduce some of
the properties observed in the biological system at the neural and
movement levels, (ii) that the dynamics of the motor map remains a
stereotyped one even when the motor map is subject to abnormal
stimulation patterns. The latter result emphasizes the role of the
topographic projection that connects the the motor map to the
push-pull circuitry in determining the features of the resulting
movements.


Please email requests to: linda at eecs.nwu.edu (not to me!)