Collaborative Proposal: Visual Attention in an Invertebrate Predator

所有视觉动物都面临着快速有效地区分相关刺激和分散刺激的问题。视觉系统完成这一任务的一种方式是通过选择性注意，即动物一次只注意一部分可用的视觉刺激。微小的跳蛛有着微小的眼睛，几乎和人类一样敏锐，像人类一样，注意并区分视觉目标。这个项目研究跳蛛如何注意和识别移动的视觉物体。 跳蛛眼睛和大脑的简单性使得学习大脑的神经网络如何“计算”视觉运动和物体识别比人类更容易。 在人类和跳蛛中，选择性视觉注意力是通过快速移动眼睛来关注感兴趣的目标来衡量的。这项研究采用了一种创新的眼动仪来测量蜘蛛在观看视频图像时的视线方向。此外，神经技术被用来测量蜘蛛的大脑活动，同时它的目光被监测：大脑的特定部分对特定的图像和声音有不同的反应。因此，可以看到蜘蛛的视觉注意力以及如何解释不同的刺激。了解这种优雅，小型化和非常有效的视觉系统将是机器人专家和工程师感兴趣的，对他们来说，生物传感器的微型化是小型自主机器人的优势。此外，PI还将培训一名研究生、一名博士后和一名本科生，并将为一个名为“科学的面孔和声音”的项目制作视频，突出来自不同背景的研究人员的个人故事。这些视频将在网上提供给教师和教授，供他们在讲座中使用。视觉动物面临着快速有效地区分相关刺激和分散注意力的刺激的问题。 一种方法是通过选择性注意，即动物一次只注意部分视野，通过扫视眼球运动和选择性目标扫描的过程。 这对人类来说是正确的，在行为层面上对跳蛛来说似乎也是如此。 这些蜘蛛具有高度的视觉能力，是罕见的具有可移动眼睛的无脊椎动物。 PI开发了两种新技术，可以全面研究选择性视觉注意力。 其中包括一种创新的蜘蛛眼动仪，它可以精确地监测蜘蛛在扫描刺激图像时的真实的眼球运动，以及活体蜘蛛在观察视觉刺激时大脑中的第一个电生理记录。眼动仪将用于监测眼球运动，同时记录大脑中单个单元的记录。 因此，PI将测试关于视觉注意力、眼球运动和相关大脑活动的明确假设。 这些包括“自下而上”刺激驱动的注意力过程，通过测试不同的视觉刺激如何影响眼球运动和大脑中的神经过程，以及“自上而下”的过程，通过呈现跨模态线索和测量眼球运动和神经过程，因为蜘蛛在干扰物中搜索相关刺激。

All visual animals face the problem of distinguishing relevant from distracting stimuli quickly and efficiently. One way that visual systems accomplish this task is through selective attention, where an animal attends to a portion of the available visual stimuli at a time. Tiny jumping spiders have microminiature eyes that are nearly as acute as a human's and, like humans, pays attention and discriminates among visual targets. This project investigates how jumping spiders pay attention to and identify moving visual objects. The simplicity of the jumping spider eye and brain makes it easier to learn how the brain's neural networks "compute" visual movement and object identification, than in humans. In humans AND jumping spiders, selective visual attention is measured by rapid movements of their eyes to focus on targets of interest. This study employs an innovative eyetracker to measure the direction of a spider's gaze as it views video images. In addition, neural techniques are used to measure the activity of the spider's brain while its gaze is being monitored: specific parts of the brain respond differentially to particular images and sounds. Thus, it is possible to see both what engages a spider's visual attention as well as how different stimuli are interpreted. Understanding this elegant, miniaturized and extremely effective visual system will be of interest to roboticists and engineers, for whom micro-miniaturization of biosensors is a premium in small, self-autonomous robots. In addition, the PI will train a graduate student, a postdoc, and undergraduates, and will create videos for a project called "Faces and Voices of Science" that highlight the personal stories of researchers from different backgrounds. The videos will be made available online for teachers and professors to incorporate in lectures.Visual animals face the problem of distinguishing relevant from distracting stimuli quickly and efficiently. One way to do this is through selective attention, where the animal attends to only part of the visual field at a time, through a process of saccadic eye movements and selective target scan. This is true for humans and at the behavioral level seems true for jumping spiders. These spiders are highly visual and are among the rare invertebrate animals that have moveable eyes. The PIs have developed two novel technologies that allow a comprehensive study of selective visual attention. These include an innovative spider eyetracker can monitor with precision a spider's eye movements in real time as they scan a stimulus image and the first electrophysiological recordings in the brain of a living spider as it observes visual stimuli. The eyetracker will be deployed to monitor eye movements while simultaneously recordings from single units in the brain are recorded. The PIs will thus test explicit hypotheses about visual attention, eye movements, and correlated brain activity. These include "bottom-up" stimulus-driven attentional processes by testing how different visual stimuli influence eye movements and neural processes in the brain, as well as "top-down" processes by presenting cross-modal cues and measuring eye movements and neural processes as the spider searches for relevant stimuli among distractors.