Prioritizing saccades according to their relative costs and benefits

我该留下还是该走？在我们的日常生活中，改变和坚持之间的冲突是一个非常熟悉的选择，无论是一个琐碎的选择，比如离开一个社交活动，还是一个“重大的人生选择”，比如离开一个人的工作。这个项目假设这种类型的决定支持我们最常见的选择：下一步看哪里。平均而言，我们的眼睛以离散的跳跃（扫视）运动的频率是我们心跳的两倍。虽然这感觉非常自动，但每个动作都涉及到何时移动的无意识决定。我是应该继续在当前的焦点上探索我的最大分辨率，还是现在是时候探索太空的新区域了？运动有好处也有代价，因为运动过程中的视觉干扰（比如相机抖动）在感知上被抑制了，这意味着我们醒着的10%的时间里大部分都是瞎的。这个项目测试了一个新的假设，即扫视选择是由对其相对成本和收益的评估决定的，这使我们能够优先考虑更好的选择而不是更差的选择。同样的框架将应用于测试帕金森病中出现的眼跳问题是否由于成本/效益评估的失败。通过了解这样一个简单但普遍的决策过程是如何驱动的，研究人员希望揭示大脑中决策制定的更基本和更普遍的原则。更广泛地说，理解大脑是如何在动态环境中实现最佳行为的，是神经科学中的一个关键问题，也是在这个过程出错时进行干预的关键问题。阐明帕金森病的这些过程可能有助于更好地诊断疾病的发生和进展。

Should I stay or should I go now? The clash between changing and staying the course is a very familiar choice in our everyday lives be it a trivial choice such as leaving a social event, or a 'big life choice' such as leaving one's job. This project hypothesizes that this type of decision underpins our most frequent choice: where to look next. On average, we move our eyes in discrete jumps (saccades) twice as often as we beat our hearts. Although this feels very automatic, each movement involves a mostly unconscious decision of when to move. Should I continue to exploit my maximum resolution vision on my current focal point, or is now the time to explore new regions of space? There are also costs as well as benefits to moving, since the visual disturbance during the movement (think major camera shake) is perceptually suppressed, meaning we are mostly blinded during the 10% of our waking lives spent making these movements. This project tests the novel hypothesis that saccade choices are governed by an evaluation of their relative costs and benefits, allowing us to prioritize better choices over worse ones. The same framework will be applied to test if the problems in initiating saccades seen in Parkinson's disease are due to a breakdown in a cost/benefit evaluation. By understanding how such a simple, but pervasive, decision process is driven, the investigators expect to reveal more fundamental and general principles of decision making in the brain. Understanding how the brain achieves optimal behavior in dynamic environments, more broadly, is a critical issue in neuroscience and for intervening when this process goes awry. Clarifying these processes in Parkinson's disease could lead to better diagnostic tests of disease onset and progression.