Spatiotemporal interaction of saccades and visual motion processing

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We make rapid eye movements called saccades several times per second.  Saccades are useful for scanning one's surroundings and for improving the sensitivity of visual processing.  Despite the frequency of saccadic eye movements and their effects on the visual input, we generally perceive the world to be quite stable.  That is, the eye movements that frequently alter the visual input do not disrupt our ability to process visual information.  This stability is thought to be the result of neural mechanisms that combine visual input with motor signals related to the metrics of each saccadic eye movement.  To understand how these mechanisms work, the research described in this proposal will focus on visual perception during tasks that require saccadic eye movements.     Our laboratory will use behavioural experiments to determine how subjects process visual information around the time that they make a saccadic eye movement.  In particular, we will ask how the saccade affects the accuracy and precision of visual processing, and how visual processing affects the accuracy of saccadic eye movements.  The results from these behavioural studies will be combined with electrophysiological studies that monitor the activity of neurons that are involved in eye movements and visual perception.  By combining perceptual and electrophysiological studies, we will deepen our understanding of the relationship between neuronal events and mental events, which will be important in understanding how the brain functions when it works properly and exactly what goes wrong when it does not.