Toronto, April 21 (IANS) While planning a visual task, your brain initially reflects the visual goal accurately but errors accumulate during a memory delay and further escalate during the final action, say scientists from York University.
�Think of all the times you see something and plan to act on it but after only a short delay, you make a mistake,” said professor Doug Crawford.
�For example, before my morning coffee kicks in, I’m great at making silly mistakes like putting the honey away in the fridge instead of the peanut butter,� he added.
For the study, led by Amirsaman Sajad in Crawford’s visuomotor neuroscience lab, researchers recorded signals in the frontal cortex area of the brain during the delay between target-related visual activity and intended gaze-related motor activity.
The visual response and memory activity for the time in between was then analysed.
�We looked at what happens from vision to memory to action and how the spatial code changes through time in the frontal cortex,� said Sajad.
�In the Olympics tennis analogy, when a high degree of accuracy is required, a one-second delay in frontal cortex processing could make the difference between an Olympic gold and silver,� Crawford noted.
The findings, published in the journal eNeuro, are of particular significance to research in diseases affecting frontal cortex function �because if errors accumulate in healthy individuals, the accumulations would be much worse with diseases that affect frontal cortex function,� the authors noted.
