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Understanding the neural mechanisms for perceiving long-range motion

了解感知长距离运动的神经机制

基本信息

批准号：
BB/N018516/1
负责人：
Justin Ales
金额：
$ 50.01万
依托单位：
University of St Andrews
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2017
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2017 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=BB%2FN018516%2F1
关键词：
Understanding neural mechanisms perceiving long

项目摘要

Understanding the brain is one of the major scientific undertakings of the past and current century. The visual system is one of the largest and most important parts of the brain. A core function of the visual system is to process and interpret motion. Motion is a critical cue in the environment because it underlies our abilities to interact with the world. When objects are in a cluttered environment they can move behind and around other objects. These movements cause objects to disappear from view for large intervals of space and time before reappearing later. Humans are able to easily perceive motion along these complex paths. However, our current understanding of the brain cannot explain how this is accomplished. The proposed research will allow us to develop new models of how the brain processes motion, one of the most important roles of vision for a mobile animal such as ourselves. Over the last 4-5 decades, a beautiful architecture has been worked out showing how the brain progressively processes moving stimuli to create a cohesive and correct impression of motion in the world. The details of this architecture has improved our knowledge of how groups of neurons our organized and communicate. The wider neuroscientific community has utilized the impacts of these conceptual advances. The understanding of the brains response to motion enables researchers to build more complicated experiments that probe other functions of the brain. For example, because we know how motion is integrated across brain regions it has become an important stimulus used to study how the brain creates decisions about the world. This makes motion a fundamentally important topic underpinning our efforts for a complete understanding of the brain. But this detailed and elegant work is insufficient as it can only explain motion processing over small regions of space: our current models can misinterpret an objects true motion. We are missing an understanding of how motion is integrated when there are missing segments in the motion of an object. This is an important feature of real objects moving through the natural environment. It happens when objects move behind surfaces. The missing segments make it difficult to interpret what is happening. Our current understanding of the brain doesn't explain how this works. Humans, however, are able to perceive motion from a wide variety of stimuli that can move in complex environments. The neural mechanisms responsible for this ability have yet to be identified and characterized. The proposed project will provide a missing piece of our understanding of the brain by determining a better and more general understanding of how the brain processes moving objects. This will be accomplished by combining multiple state-of-the-art neuroimaging methods. In the past, brain imaging tools have been able to study either brain function across space (the classic 'brain areas' identified by fMRI), or across time (EEG recordings from the scalp). My work will allow these tools to be combined in powerful new ways. These tools will be used to create a complete picture of the set of brain areas, and how they interact to process motion.

了解大脑是过去和本世纪的主要科学事业之一。视觉系统是大脑中最大和最重要的部分之一。视觉系统的核心功能是处理和解释运动。运动是环境中的一个关键线索，因为它是我们与世界互动的能力的基础。当物体处于杂乱的环境中时，它们可以在其他物体的后面和周围移动。这些运动导致物体在很长的时间和空间间隔内从视野中消失，然后再出现。人类能够很容易地感知沿着这些复杂路径的运动。然而，我们目前对大脑的理解无法解释这是如何实现的。这项拟议中的研究将使我们能够开发出大脑如何处理运动的新模型，这是视觉对像我们这样的移动的动物最重要的作用之一。在过去的40 - 50年里，一个美丽的架构已经制定出来，展示了大脑如何逐步处理移动的刺激，以创造一个有凝聚力的和正确的运动印象在世界上。这种结构的细节提高了我们对神经元组如何组织和通信的认识。更广泛的神经科学界已经利用了这些概念进步的影响。了解大脑对运动的反应使研究人员能够建立更复杂的实验来探索大脑的其他功能。例如，因为我们知道运动是如何在大脑区域之间整合的，它已经成为研究大脑如何对世界做出决定的重要刺激。这使得运动成为一个非常重要的话题，支撑着我们对大脑的全面理解。但是，这种详细而优雅的工作是不够的，因为它只能解释小区域空间的运动处理：我们目前的模型可能会误解物体的真实运动。当物体的运动中有缺失的片段时，我们缺少对运动是如何整合的理解。这是在自然环境中移动的真实的物体的重要特征。当物体在曲面后面移动时，就会发生这种情况。缺失的片段使得很难解释正在发生的事情。我们目前对大脑的理解并不能解释这是如何工作的。然而，人类能够从各种各样的刺激中感知运动，这些刺激可以在复杂的环境中移动。负责这种能力的神经机制尚未被确定和表征。拟议的项目将通过确定对大脑如何处理移动物体的更好和更全面的理解来提供我们对大脑理解的缺失部分。这将通过结合多种最先进的神经成像方法来实现。在过去，大脑成像工具已经能够研究跨空间的大脑功能（功能性磁共振成像识别的经典“大脑区域”）或跨时间的大脑功能（来自头皮的脑电图记录）。我的工作将使这些工具以强大的新方式结合起来。这些工具将用于创建一组大脑区域的完整图片，以及它们如何相互作用以处理运动。