Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 2 (NIPS 1989)
Stephen DeWeerth, Carver Mead
The vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) is the primary mechanism that controls the compensatory eye movements that stabilize retinal im(cid:173) ages during rapid head motion. The primary pathways of this sys(cid:173) tem are feed-forward, with inputs from the semicircular canals and outputs to the oculomotor system. Since visual feedback is not used directly in the VOR computation, the system must exploit motor learning to perform correctly. Lisberger(1988) has proposed a model for adapting the VOR gain using image-slip information from the retina. We have designed and tested analog very large(cid:173) scale integrated (VLSI) circuitry that implements a simplified ver(cid:173) sion of Lisberger's adaptive VOR model.