{"doi":"10.7554/elife.50962","title":"Mechanisms that allow cortical preparatory activity without inappropriate movement","abstract":"We reveal a novel mechanism that explains how preparatory activity can evolve in motor-related cortical areas without prematurely inducing movement. The smooth eye movement region of the frontal eye fields (FEFSEM) is a critical node in the neural circuit controlling smooth pursuit eye movement. Preparatory activity evolves in the monkey FEFSEM during fixation in parallel with an objective measure of visual-motor gain. We propose that the use of FEFSEM output as a gain signal rather than a movement command allows for preparation to progress in pursuit without causing movement. We also show that preparatory modulation of firing rate in FEFSEM predicts movement, providing evidence against the ‘movement-null’ space hypothesis as an explanation of how preparatory activity can progress without movement. Finally, there is a partial reorganization of FEFSEM population activity between preparation and movement that would allow for a directionally non-specific component of preparatory visual-motor gain enhancement in pursuit.","journal":"eLife","year":2020,"id":76684,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":20,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9535,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":399809,"name":"Stephen G. Lisberger","orcid":"0000-0001-7859-4361","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":399808,"name":"Timothy R. Darlington","orcid":"0000-0001-5534-7552","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":62,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T21:48:27.511277Z","pmid":"32081130","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}