Marco Bedini¹ (), Uriel Lascombes¹, Sina M Kling¹, Guillaume S Masson¹, Martin Szinte¹; ¹Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone, CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université, Marseille, France

While extensive research has elucidated the neural networks underlying eye movements in non-human primates, the functional architecture of these networks in humans remains relatively unclear. Here, we analyzed high-field resting-state fMRI data using reproducible pipelines in the context of a larger dataset targeting oculomotor functions and visual field mapping in 20 healthy participants. We computed correlations of BOLD time series between all surface vertices belonging to retinotopic regions along the cortical visual hierarchy and macro-anatomical clusters in the parietal and prefrontal cortex localized along the medial, superior, and inferior branches of the precentral sulcus. These clusters were defined by merging regions of the Glasser multimodal parcellation and spanned the supplementary and cingulate eye fields, the frontal eye field, and the premotor eye field, respectively. We refined the selection of our vertices in oculomotor areas in parietal and frontal clusters to those strongly activated during visual, smooth pursuit, and saccadic eye movement tasks. Using a seed-based functional connectivity approach, we contrasted pairwise correlations between all clusters and systematically evaluated their contributions to the overall connectivity patterns. Our analyses revealed consistent functional connectivity patterns linking the oculomotor parietal clusters to the three major prefrontal clusters. Combined, our results provide a comprehensive framework for understanding the functional architecture of the human eye fields.

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship awarded by the FRM to M.B. (SPF202409019664), and an ANR JCJC and a Fyssen Foundation grant to M.S..