The cerebellum involvement in the generation of saccades.
It was assumed that the cerebellum is not essential for eye movements, playing only a modifying and influencing role. Recently it has been shown that the directions of the saccades can be related to a stimulated cerebellar site. This study was done on patients who underwent partial vermis and hemisphere ablations as a result of severe cranial or cerebellar tumors. The results further indicate that lack that lack of some cerebellar neural structure affects the nature of the saccade: it does not move the eyes in one saccade to acquire the new target and its amplitude duration relationship changes. It is suggested that cerebellar cortex generates a neural pulse based on teleceptive information about stimulus location with respect to an observer's head, corrects this information for initial eye position and sends out a signal to the saccadic pulse generators which move the eyes to acquire the new target.
D001921:Brain / Q000601:surgery; D002525:Cerebellar Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D002531:Cerebellum / Q000502:physiology* / Q000601:surgery; D005133:Eye Movements; D005246:Feedback; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D012438:Saccades