Neural Mechanisms for Perceiving Object Motion During Self-Motion

 描述(申请人提供)：感知环境中物体的运动对日常生活的许多方面都至关重要。虽然人们对视觉运动感知的神经基础了解很多，但几乎所有这些知识都来自于观察者的眼睛、头部和身体保持静止的实验。当观察者在环境中移动时，物体在视网膜上的运动既取决于物体在世界上的运动，也取决于观察者的自身运动。因此，要估计世界上物体的运动，必须在计算中考虑自运动。这一能力对于日常活动(如驾驶车辆)至关重要，在此期间，准确判断环境中其他对象的运动非常重要，例如其他车辆或行人。众所周知，在阿尔茨海默病等神经系统疾病和正常衰老过程中，对自我运动的感知会退化，因此了解自我运动过程中物体运动感知的神经基础对于开发治疗这些缺陷具有重要意义。我们提出了一系列实验，首次系统地探索了物体在自我运动过程中运动知觉的神经机制。目的#1探索视觉机制，通过这些机制，光流可以被解析成与自我运动和物体运动有关的分量。行为研究已经证明了流分析的知觉后果，但其神经基础尚不清楚。我们检验了视网膜运动区神经元的反应调节流动分析知觉效应的假设。目标2采用了一种新的行为范式，训练猕猴判断自我运动中的物体运动，并在以世界为中心或以头部为中心的坐标下报告他们的感知。我们假设视觉和前庭自我运动信号对物体运动的感知都有重要贡献。通过记录执行这项任务期间多个大脑区域的神经元，我们寻求识别计算的神经关联，这些计算用于灵活地表示以世界为中心或以头部为中心的坐标中的对象运动。这项拟议的研究与国家眼科研究所斜视、弱视和视觉处理计划的研究重点直接相关。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Perceiving the motion of objects in our environment is critical to many aspects of daily life. Although much is known about the neural basis of visual motion perception, almost all of that knowledge is derived from experiments in which the observer's eyes, head, and body remain stationary. When an observer moves through the environment, the motion of an object on the retina depends on both the movement of the object in the world and the self-motion of the observer. Thus, to estimate the motion of objects in the world, self-motion must be factored into the computations. This capability is critical to daily activities such as driving a vehicle, during which it is important to accurately judge the movement of other objects in the environment, such as other vehicles or pedestrians. As perception of self-motion is known to be degraded in neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and during normal aging, understanding the neural basis of object motion perception during self-motion is of substantial importance to developing therapies for these deficits. We propose a series of experiments that provides the first systematic exploration of the neural mechanisms of object motion perception during self- motion. Aim #1 explores visual mechanisms by which optic flow may be parsed into components related to self-motion and object motion. Behavioral studies have demonstrated perceptual consequences of flow parsing, but the neural basis is unknown. We test the hypothesis that responses of neurons in retinotopic motion areas mediate the perceptual effects of flow parsing Aim #2 employs a novel behavioral paradigm in which macaques are trained to judge object motion during self-motion, and to report their percepts in either world-centered or head-centered coordinates. We hypothesize that both visual and vestibular self-motion signals make important contributions to perception of object motion. By recording from neurons in multiple brain areas during performance of this task, we seek to identify neural correlates of the computations that are used to flexibly represent object motion in either world-centered or head- centered coordinates. The proposed research is directly relevant to the research priorities of the Strabismus, Amplyopia, and Visual Processing program at the National Eye Institute.