VISUOSPATIAL ATTENTION DYNAMICS & SACCADIC EYE MOVEMENTS

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DESCRIPTION (adapted from applicant's abstract): Saccadic eye movements made between points of interest are used to explore the environment. Evidence shows that a shift of attention precedes the saccade. Experiments will quantitatively describe the mechanism of the attentional shift that accompanies saccades and use the resulting model to address some long-standing phenomena in the field. The model incorporates prior findings on saccades and focused attention with new information that spatially distributed attention, used for processing large-scale information, also plays a role. Namely, during the time of saccade preparation attention expands, thus providing coarse information about the image. This approach suggest that there is a complex, dynamic attentional system that relates factors such as attentional requirements at the beginning and end points of the saccade, saccadic latency and precision, perceptual ability during saccade preparation and short-term visual memory across saccades. Experiments will map out the amount and type of attentional resources available at different points in time during saccadic programming and execution while varying factors stated above. Experiments will also determine whether the model can account for disengagements of attention, nonveridical perception around saccade onset and transaccadic memory loss. The long-term goal is to understand the coupling between saccades and attention and to learn how one could compensate for the other in patients with damage to the saccadic/attentional system.