Modeling saccade reaction time in marmosets: the contribution of earlier visual response and variable inhibition

Wajd Amly; Chih-Yang Chen; Tadashi Isa

doi:10.3389/fnsys.2024.1478019

Modeling saccade reaction time in marmosets: the contribution of earlier visual response and variable inhibition

Front Syst Neurosci. 2024 Oct 23:18:1478019. doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2024.1478019. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Wajd Amly^{1

2}, Chih-Yang Chen^{1

2}, Tadashi Isa^{1

2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Division of Neurobiology and Physiology, Department of Neuroscience, Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan.
² Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Biology (WPI-ASHBi), Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan.
³ Human Brain Research Center, Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan.

Abstract

Marmosets are expected to serve as a valuable model for studying the primate visuomotor system due to their similar oculomotor behaviors to humans and macaques. Despite these similarities, differences exist; challenges in training marmosets on tasks requiring suppression of unwanted saccades, having consistently shorter, yet more variable saccade reaction times (SRT) compared to humans and macaques. This study investigates whether the short and variable SRT in marmosets is related to differences in visual signal transduction and variability in inhibitory control. We refined a computational SRT model, adjusting parameters to better capture the marmoset SRT distribution in a gap saccade task. Our findings indicate that visual information processing is faster in marmosets, and that saccadic inhibition is more variable compared to other species.

Keywords: Callithrix jacchus; gap saccade task; inhibition; neural field model; reaction time; visual response.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant-in-aid for Scientific Research no. 23H03700 and the Brain/MINDS grant from the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED), project no. 19dm0207093h0001, Japan.