Symbolic cue-driven activity in superior colliculus neurons in a peripheral visual choice task

Recent evidence implicates the superior colliculus (SC) in cognitive processes, such as target selection and control of spatial attention, in addition to the execution of saccadic eye movements. We report here the presence of a cognitive response in some cells in the SC in a task that requires the long-term association of spatial location with an arbitrary color. In this study, using a visual choice response task, we demonstrate that visuomotor neurons in the SC were activated by the appearance of a central symbolic cue delivered outside of the visual response fields of the recorded neurons. This procedure ensures that cognitively generated activity in these SC cells is not confounded with modulation of activity from previous visual stimuli that appeared in the response field of the neurons. The experiments suggest that cognitive signals can activate SC cells by themselves instead of only being able to modulate activities already evoked by visual events. Furthermore, a substantial fraction of these cells accurately reflected cue-aligned target selection in advance of saccade initiation. Our results add further support to other studies that have demonstrated that internally generated signals exist in SC cells.