Saccades along spatial neural circuit discontinuities

Abstract Saccades are realized by six extraocular muscles that define the final reference frame for eyeball rotations. However, upstream of the nuclei innervating the eye muscles, eye movement commands are represented in two-dimensional retinocentric coordinates, as is the case in the superior colliculus (SC). In such spatial coordinates, the horizontal and vertical visual field meridians, relative to the line of sight, are associated with neural tissue discontinuities due to routing of binocular retinal outputs when forming retinotopic sensory-motor maps. At the level of the SC, a functional discontinuity along the horizontal meridian was additionally discovered, beyond the structural vertical discontinuity associated with hemifield lateralization. How do such neural circuit discontinuities influence purely cardinal saccades? Using thousands of saccades from 3 rhesus macaque monkeys and 14 human subjects, we show how the likelihood of purely horizontal or vertical saccades is infinitesimally small, nulling a discontinuity problem. This does not mean that saccades are sloppy. On the contrary, saccades exhibit remarkable direction and amplitude corrections to account for small initial eye position deviations due to fixational variability: “purely” cardinal saccades can deviate, with an orthogonal component of as little as 0.03 deg, to correct for tiny target position deviations from initial eye position. In humans, probing perceptual target localization additionally revealed that saccades show different biases from perception when targets deviate slightly from purely cardinal directions. These results demonstrate a new functional role for fixational eye movements in visually-guided behavior, and they motivate further neurophysiological investigations of saccade trajectory control in the brainstem. New and Noteworthy Purely cardinal saccades are often characterized as being straight. We show how a small amount of curvature is inevitable, alleviating an implementational problem of dealing with neural circuit discontinuities in the representations of the visual meridians. The small curvature functionally corrects for minute variability in initial eye position due to fixational eye movements. Saccades are far from sloppy; they deviate by as little as <1% of the total vector size to adjust their landing position.