Contextual Learning in the Adaptation of Saccadic Eye Movements

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。习得的运动行为通常会适应它们的环境。各种肌肉收缩模式的协调以一种微妙而复杂的方式取决于运动行为发生的环境。然而，眼球运动似乎更为刻板。当一个人选择看某样东西时，他们会对它做一个眼球运动（“扫视”）。由于扫视是如此短暂，它们在运动过程中无法由视觉引导，而必须依靠每次扫视后的反馈来调整后续扫视的幅度，这种现象被称为扫视适应。在实验室的实验中，在视觉较差的情况下，通过在每次扫视过程中偷偷移动目标来诱导跳眼适应。眼动系统进行了补偿，就好像它的扫视是错误的一样。一般认为，只有目标的位置与跳跃式控制有关，而与目标的类型无关。最近的研究结果反驳了这一观点，表明在扫视过程中，两种不同类型的目标运动相同，导致两种不同类型的代偿性眼球运动。换句话说，扫视适应取决于视觉环境。目前的研究目的是澄清眼动的上下文学习是由产生眼动的大脑部分进行的高度受限的机器式“学习”，还是一种利用任何可用信息线索的一般学习机制的表现。本文详细探讨了指导跳眼适应的上下文信息的本质，以确定跳眼运动的上下文学习所起的作用。由于这些实验处于生物学、工程学和心理学的交叉点，它们有可能吸引来自这两个学科的学生，并促进跨学科的合作。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Learned motor acts generally adjust to their context. The orchestration of the pattern of contraction of various muscles depends in a subtle and complex way on the circumstances in which the motor act occurs. Eye movements, however, seem more stereotyped. When a person chooses to look at something, they make an eye movement to it (a "saccade"). Because saccades are so brief, they cannot be guided by vision during the movement but must rely on feedback after each saccade to adjust the amplitude of subsequent saccades, a phenomenon known as saccade adaptation. Experiments in the laboratory induce saccade adaptation by surreptitiously moving the target during each saccade, while vision is poor. The eye movement system compensates as though its saccades had been in error. It is generally assumed that it is only the location of the target that is relevant for saccadic control, not the type of target. Recent findings contradict this view, showing that two different types of target moved identically during the saccade result in two different types of compensatory eye movements. In other words, saccade adaptation depends on the visual context.The present work aims to clarify whether contextual learning of saccadic eye movements is a highly restricted machine-like "learning" by the part of the brain that generates eye movements or is a manifestation of a general learning mechanism that makes use of whatever informative cues are available. The nature of the contextual information that guides saccadic adaptation is explored in detail in order to determine what function contextual learning of saccadic eye movements serves. Because these experiments lie at the interface of biology, engineering, and psychology, they have the potential to attract students from both disciplines and to foster interdisciplinary collaborations.