Kavli Affiliate: John Reynolds
| Authors: Nicholas M Dotson and John H Reynolds
| Summary:
Visual selection and saccade targeting are not obligatorily coupled, allowing a stimulus at one location to guide an eye movement toward another. This is mediated by frontal oculomotor cortex, where maps of visual and motor space converge, yet whether the topographic relationship between these maps itself contributes to this flexibility is unknown. Using Neuropixels recordings across horizontal segments of marmoset cortex, we find that individually visual and saccade vector angles change smoothly, with occasional abrupt jumps. Rather than a one-to-one visual-motor mapping, local cortical patches contain a combination of aligned and misaligned vector angles. Mosaic map models reproduce the empirical distributions of local angle differences for visual and motor maps, revealing that the two maps have constrained and distinct spatial scales. When combined, these mosaic maps generate a moiré pattern that quantitatively matches the observed visual-motor angular differences, providing a substrate for flexible transformations between visual inputs and saccade outputs.