A model of basal ganglia in saccade generation

We model the role played by the Basal Ganglia (BG) in generation of voluntary saccadic eye movements. Performance of the model is evaluated on a set of tasks such as feature and conjunction searches, directional selectivity and a successive saccade task. Behavioral phenomena such as independence of search time on number of distracters in feature search and linear increase in search time with number of distracters in conjunction search are observed. It is also seen that saccadic reaction times are longer and search efficiency is impaired on diminished BG contribution, which corroborates with reported data obtained from Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.