Influence of Eye Movements on Visual Input Statistics and Early Neural Representations

尽管视网膜上的图案随着眼睛的运动而不断变化，但大脑感知稳定视觉世界的能力是惊人的。从一个场景位置到下一个场景位置，每秒都会发生几次自愿的凝视重定向。即使在这些重定向之间的间隔时间内，当凝视似乎固定在一个位置时，微观的眼睛运动，也就是所谓的凝视性眼睛运动，也会不断地使刺激相对于视网膜抖动。关于宏观和微观眼球运动的正常交替如何影响视网膜刺激，以及这种动态输入对视觉系统的重要性，人们知之甚少。在国家科学基金会的支持下，米歇尔·鲁奇博士将研究眼睛运动对视觉信息获取和编码的影响。人类观察者的实验将分析和比较在一些日常观看活动中视网膜的视觉输入信号的特征。我们将使用视觉系统早期神经元群的计算机模型来研究这样一种假设，即不断变化的视网膜刺激有助于建立有效的视觉表征。这个项目解决了视觉神经科学中的基本问题。引起异常眼球运动的病理情况通常伴随着视觉损伤。了解眼球运动对早期视觉处理的影响，对于了解视觉系统如何在健康和疾病中发挥作用至关重要。

The brain is remarkable in its ability to perceive a stable visual world even though the patterns on the retinas change continually as the eyes are always in motion. Voluntary redirections of gaze occur several times per second from one scene location to the next. Even in the intervals between these redirections, when it seems that gaze is fixed at a single location, microscopic eye movements, known as fixational eye movements, continually jitter the stimulus with respect to the retina. Little is known about how the normal alternation of macroscopic and microscopic eye movements affects the retinal stimulus, and about the importance of this dynamic input for the visual system. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Michele Rucci will examine the influence of eye movements on the acquisition and encoding of visual information. Experiments with human observers will analyze and compare the characteristics of visual input signals to the retina during a number of everyday viewing activities. Computer models of neuronal populations in the early stages of the visual system will be used to investigate the hypothesis that a continually changing retinal stimulus contributes to the establishment of efficient visual representations. This project addresses fundamental questions in visual neuroscience. Pathological conditions which give rise to abnormal eye movements are typically accompanied by visual impairments. Understanding the impact of eye movements on early visual processing is critical to the advancement of knowledge of how the visual system functions in health and disease.