Unity of action: Coordination of movement plans between oculomotor areas

The control of movement in the nervous system is highly parallel. Several brain areas are typically involved in the planning movements for any given part of the body. Coordination of their decisions is essential to insure coherent behavior. This thesis develops a theory of coordination for eye movement planning in the oculomotor system. A neural network model of a single oculomotor area is first introduced. It plans sequences of saccades to multiple targets in visual space. That model is then duplicated to give two areas that plan movements in parallel. The two areas use different criteria to plan saccades. Interactions between them insure that their decisions are coherent.