CAREER: Neural Basis of the Perception of Motion through Depth

职业：深度感知运动的神经基础

• 批准号: 0748413
• 负责人: Alexander Huk
• 金额: $ 55万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Austin
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-05-15 至 2014-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0748413&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Neural; Basis; Perception; Motion

Objects move through three dimensions, and the accurate perception of motion through depth is a key element underlying many human behaviors. From everyday activities like driving a car or shaking hands, to specialized skills like performing surgery or hitting a baseball, seeing the 3D trajectory of a moving object is a critical and central perceptual capacity. Although much research has focused on how the brain processes motion on flat (2D) surfaces, there is surprisingly little knowledge regarding how cues to depth are combined with motion signals to represent 3D motions. The goals of this project are therefore to identify and characterize the neural mechanisms involved in representing 3D direction of motion. Because a human's eyes are horizontally offset within the head, the two eyes view the visual world with some slight difference. The visual system must exploit the dynamic pattern of differences between the two eye's views to extract the direction of 3D motion. With support from a National Science Foundation CAREER award, Dr. Alex Huk and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin will perform a series of behavioral experiments to identify which pieces of binocular information are used to represent 3D motion. A series of functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments will then use the same experimental displays to identify the resulting signals in relevant parts of the human brain, including primary visual cortex, the middle temporal area (an area known to process 2D motion), and subregions within the posterior parietal lobe. To more directly link perceptual experiences and brain activity, measurements of perceptual sensitivity to particular forms of 3D motion will then be quantitatively compared to measurements of neural sensitivity to these same motions.These studies will provide a thorough characterization of how the brain processes visual motion in realistic environments, extending the careful behavioral and neural studies of 2D motion and static depth processing to a dynamic 3D world. The results will not only facilitate the integration and extension of current understanding of model subsystems within the visual cortex, but will more generally characterize some of the ways by which the nervous system represents information that is fundamentally complex and multidimensional. Likewise, this work may enable the development of 3D visual display technologies that are better suited to human visual capabilities. The CAREER award will support the training of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral researchers, both in the classroom and the laboratory. It will also facilitate the development of compelling visual demonstrations at the heart of educational outreach efforts in high schools in both urban and rural areas around Austin.

物体在三维空间中移动，通过深度对运动的准确感知是许多人类行为的关键因素。从驾驶汽车或握手等日常活动，到执行手术或打棒球等专业技能，看到移动物体的3D轨迹是一种关键和核心的感知能力。虽然许多研究都集中在大脑如何处理平面（2D）表面上的运动，但令人惊讶的是，关于深度线索如何与运动信号结合以表示3D运动的知识很少。因此，该项目的目标是识别和表征参与表示3D运动方向的神经机制。因为人类的眼睛在头部内水平偏移，所以两只眼睛观看视觉世界有一些细微的差异。视觉系统必须利用双眼视图之间的差异的动态模式来提取3D运动的方向。在美国国家科学基金会CAREER奖的支持下，德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的Alex Huk博士及其同事将进行一系列行为实验，以确定哪些双目信息用于表示3D运动。然后，一系列功能性磁共振成像实验将使用相同的实验显示来识别人脑相关部分中的结果信号，包括初级视觉皮层，中颞区（已知处理2D运动的区域）和后顶叶内的子区域。为了更直接地将感知体验和大脑活动联系起来，对特定形式的3D运动的感知灵敏度的测量将与对这些相同运动的神经灵敏度的测量进行定量比较。这些研究将提供大脑如何在现实环境中处理视觉运动的全面表征，将2D运动和静态深度处理的仔细行为和神经研究扩展到动态3D世界。这些结果不仅有助于整合和扩展当前对视觉皮层模型子系统的理解，而且将更普遍地描述神经系统代表信息的方式，这些信息从根本上是复杂和多维的。同样，这项工作可能会使更适合人类视觉能力的3D视觉显示技术的发展成为可能。职业奖将支持本科生，研究生和博士后研究人员的培训，无论是在课堂上和实验室。它还将促进奥斯汀周围城市和农村地区高中教育外展工作核心的引人注目的视觉演示的开发。