The oculomotor periphery was formerly regarded as a simple mechanism executing complex behaviors explicitly specified by innervation. It is now recognized that several fundamental aspects of ocular motility are properties of the extraocular muscles (EOMs) and their associated connective tissue pulleys. The Active Pulley Hypothesis proposes that rectus and inferior oblique EOMs have connective t...

Goal-directed movements, such as pointing and saccades, have been shown to share similar neural architectures, in spite of the different neuromuscular systems producing them. Such structure involve an inverse model of the actuator being controlled, which produces the commands innervating the muscles, and a forward model of the actuator, which predicts the sensory consequences of such commands a...

In recent years, modeling of ocular premotor circuits in the brainstem has unmasked several advantages linked to the topology of these circuits. In particular, their bilateral symmetry can implicitly provide for rich motor behavior in response to sensory patterns such as 1) coordination of vergence and version trajectories in binocular systems, 2) simple fusion of multiple sensory sources with ...

Transformation of head-fixed otolith signals into a space-fixed frame of reference is essential for perception of self-orientation and ocular motor control. In monkeys the nodulus and ventral uvula of the vestibulo-cerebellum facilitate this transformation by computing an internal estimate of direction of gravity. These experimental findings motivated the hypothesis that degeneration of the ves...

Synaptic plasticity in the cerebellum is thought to contribute to motor learning. In particular, long-term depression (LTD) at parallel fiber (PF) to Purkinje neuron (PN) excitatory synapses has attracted much attention of neuroscientists as a primary cellular mechanism for motor learning. In contrast, roles of plasticity at cerebellar inhibitory synapses in vivo remain unknown. Here, we have i...

Recent neuroscience studies have been concerned with how aimed movements are generated on the basis of target localization. However, visual information from the surroundings as well as from the target can influence arm motor control, in a manner similar to known effects in postural and ocular motor control. Here, we show an ultra-fast manual motor response directly induced by a large-field visu...

A 48-year-old man presented with progressive weakness that started in the first decade of his life. He had difficulty climbing stairs since the third decade of his life. The initial neurological examination of the patient revealed a slender myopathic face with temporal muscle atrophy, without ptosis or ophthalmoplegia (Fig. 1A). Motor power examination revealed that the motor powers in his prox...

To explore the process of motor command generation for the ocular following response, we recorded the activity of single neurons in the medial superior temporal (MST) area of the cortex, the dorsolateral pontine nucleus (DLPN), and the ventral paraflocculus (VPFL) of the cerebellum of alert monkeys during ocular following elicited by sudden movements of a large-field pattern. Using second-order...

Background: Cerebral palsy (CP) describes a group of permanent disorder the development movement and posture, causing activity limitation, that are attributed to non-progressive disturbance occurred in developing fetal or infant brain. The motor disorders cerebral often accompanied by disturbances sensation, perception, cognition, communication behavior, epilepsy, secondary musculoskeletal prob...

Only a few reports have focused on ocular motor paralysis in herpes zoster ophthalmicus. We report a case of ocular motor paralysis resulting from herpes zoster. The patient, an 80-yr-old woman, presented with grouped vesicles, papules, and crusting in the left temporal area and scalp, with diplopia, impaired gaze, and severe pain. Her cerebrospinal fluid analysis was positive for varicellar zo...