Contextual Learning in the Adaptation of Saccadic Eye Movements

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111 - 5）资助的。各种肌肉的收缩模式的协调以一种微妙而复杂的方式取决于运动行为发生的环境。然而，眼球运动似乎更加刻板。当一个人选择看某样东西时，他们会对它进行眼球运动（“扫视”）。由于扫视是如此短暂，它们在运动期间不能由视觉引导，而是必须依赖于每次扫视后的反馈来调整后续扫视的幅度，这种现象称为扫视适应。实验室中的实验通过在每次扫视期间偷偷移动目标来诱导扫视适应，而视觉是差的。眼球运动系统会进行补偿，就好像它的扫视是错误的一样。通常假设，与扫视控制相关的仅仅是目标的位置，而不是目标的类型。最近的研究结果反驳了这一观点，表明两种不同类型的目标在眼跳过程中移动相同，导致两种不同类型的补偿性眼动。换句话说，扫视适应取决于视觉context.The目前的工作旨在澄清是否上下文学习的扫视眼动是一个高度限制的机器一样的“学习”的大脑的一部分，产生的眼球运动，或者是一个一般的学习机制，利用任何信息线索是可用的表现。引导扫视适应的上下文信息的性质进行了详细探讨，以确定什么功能的扫视眼动上下文学习服务。由于这些实验位于生物学，工程学和心理学的界面，它们有可能吸引来自两个学科的学生，并促进跨学科的合作。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Learned motor acts generally adjust to their context. The orchestration of the pattern of contraction of various muscles depends in a subtle and complex way on the circumstances in which the motor act occurs. Eye movements, however, seem more stereotyped. When a person chooses to look at something, they make an eye movement to it (a "saccade"). Because saccades are so brief, they cannot be guided by vision during the movement but must rely on feedback after each saccade to adjust the amplitude of subsequent saccades, a phenomenon known as saccade adaptation. Experiments in the laboratory induce saccade adaptation by surreptitiously moving the target during each saccade, while vision is poor. The eye movement system compensates as though its saccades had been in error. It is generally assumed that it is only the location of the target that is relevant for saccadic control, not the type of target. Recent findings contradict this view, showing that two different types of target moved identically during the saccade result in two different types of compensatory eye movements. In other words, saccade adaptation depends on the visual context.The present work aims to clarify whether contextual learning of saccadic eye movements is a highly restricted machine-like "learning" by the part of the brain that generates eye movements or is a manifestation of a general learning mechanism that makes use of whatever informative cues are available. The nature of the contextual information that guides saccadic adaptation is explored in detail in order to determine what function contextual learning of saccadic eye movements serves. Because these experiments lie at the interface of biology, engineering, and psychology, they have the potential to attract students from both disciplines and to foster interdisciplinary collaborations.