Influence of Eye Movements on Visual Input Statistics and Early Neural Representations

尽管视网膜上的图案随着眼睛的运动而不断变化，但大脑在感知稳定的视觉世界方面的能力是惊人的。从一个场景位置到下一个场景位置，每秒钟会发生几次自发的视线转移。即使在这些重新定向的间隔中，当目光似乎固定在一个位置时，微小的眼球运动，即固定眼球运动，也会不断地使视网膜上的刺激物抖动。对于肉眼和显微镜下眼球运动的正常交替如何影响视网膜刺激，以及这种动态输入对视觉系统的重要性，人们知之甚少。在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，Michele Rucci博士将研究眼球运动对视觉信息获取和编码的影响。人类观察者的实验将分析和比较在许多日常观看活动中视网膜的视觉输入信号的特征。视觉系统早期阶段神经元群的计算机模型将用于研究持续变化的视网膜刺激有助于建立有效视觉表征的假设。这个项目解决了视觉神经科学的基本问题。引起眼球异常运动的病理状况通常伴随着视觉障碍。了解眼球运动对早期视觉处理的影响对于了解视觉系统在健康和疾病中如何运作至关重要。

The brain is remarkable in its ability to perceive a stable visual world even though the patterns on the retinas change continually as the eyes are always in motion. Voluntary redirections of gaze occur several times per second from one scene location to the next. Even in the intervals between these redirections, when it seems that gaze is fixed at a single location, microscopic eye movements, known as fixational eye movements, continually jitter the stimulus with respect to the retina. Little is known about how the normal alternation of macroscopic and microscopic eye movements affects the retinal stimulus, and about the importance of this dynamic input for the visual system. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Michele Rucci will examine the influence of eye movements on the acquisition and encoding of visual information. Experiments with human observers will analyze and compare the characteristics of visual input signals to the retina during a number of everyday viewing activities. Computer models of neuronal populations in the early stages of the visual system will be used to investigate the hypothesis that a continually changing retinal stimulus contributes to the establishment of efficient visual representations. This project addresses fundamental questions in visual neuroscience. Pathological conditions which give rise to abnormal eye movements are typically accompanied by visual impairments. Understanding the impact of eye movements on early visual processing is critical to the advancement of knowledge of how the visual system functions in health and disease.