The above analysis indicates that, in monkey CI, contextually inappropriate vergence movements (i.e., during fixation of a large-field stimulus at near) were associated with modulation of activity in near and far response cells. From an examination of
Figure 1, one can see that changes in vergence angle included disjunctive saccades, slow vergence drifts after saccades, and vergence-only movements. The vergence drifts that immediately follow saccades in this animal might not be the same phenomenon as vergence-only movements (which are often voluntary). For example, in the companion paper we saw that converging saccades were often followed by inappropriate slow divergence. We wondered whether these postsaccadic slow vergence drifts were encoded by SOA neurons, particularly those that carry signals related to vergence velocity. If so, then
Display Formula\(F{R_{V\dot erg}}\) (derived from
Equation 3, see Methods) should be correlated with postsaccadic vergence velocity for a subset of SOA neurons. As a first step, to identify neurons that encode vergence velocity, we analyzed the relationship between mean vergence velocity and mean
Display Formula\(F{R_{V\dot erg}}\) for vergence-only movements, using linear regression. This analysis was only performed for a given neuron if at least seven such movements were detected. Because most slow vergence movements are accompanied by one or more saccades, it is somewhat difficult to obtain a large number of these movements for a given recording. Thus, eight neurons were rejected for failing to meet the above criterion. The distributions of the slopes and R
2 values for this analysis are shown in panels A and B, respectively, of
Figure 4 for the remaining 20 neurons. The slope was significantly different from zero for 9/20 neurons (45%) and the R
2 value exceeded 0.2 for 9/20 neurons (panel B). When the same analysis was performed on the vergence drifts that immediately followed saccades, however, the R
2 values were below 0.05 for all 20 neurons (panel B). The inset of
Figure 4B shows examples of this analysis for the neuron with the strongest correlation for vergence-only movements. Note that, although this neuron convincingly encoded vergence velocity during vergence-only movements (left), there was no relationship for slow postsaccadic vergence drifts (right).