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I am currently taking a Visual Neuroscience class at UPenn and it has really opened my eyes (no pun intended) to the complexities of the nervous system, especially the visual system. There are so many intricacies to the vision that after 3 weeks of class, I couldn't even imagine how much more we were going to learn about vision because we had already covered so many things!

Anyway, to the point of this posting, I read a study that discussed the importance of corollary discharge signals in saccadic eye movement, which are the rapid, voluntary shifts in eye position between steady fixations. In this study, they recorded from certain corollary discharge signal neurons in a primate model. The recorded from neurons that were known to relay between the superior colliculus (an important visual center in the brain) to the frontal eye field. They then injected a certain chemical to inhibit the relay system and in turn found that the primates were no longer able to make saccadic movments between two fixed points and that the second saccade was completely off from the first saccade. So, what this demonstrates is that corollary discharge signals are important in mainting a steady visual precept despite sudden retinal shifts caused by saccades.