Prioritizing saccades according to their relative costs and benefits

我是应该留下来还是现在就走？改变和坚持下去之间的冲突在我们的日常生活中是非常常见的选择，无论是一个琐碎的选择，比如离开一次社交活动，还是一个“重大的人生选择”，比如离开工作。这个项目假设，这种类型的决定是我们最常见的选择的基础：下一步去哪里。平均而言，我们的眼睛跳跃(扫视)的频率是跳动心脏的两倍。尽管这感觉非常自动，但每一次移动都涉及到一个无意识的决定，即何时移动。我应该继续在我目前的焦点上利用我的最高分辨率视觉，还是现在是探索新的太空区域的时候了？移动也是有成本也有好处的，因为移动过程中的视觉干扰(想象一下主要的相机抖动)在感知上被抑制了，这意味着我们在醒着的10%的时间里做这些动作时大多是失明的。这个项目测试了一个新的假设，即眼跳选择取决于对它们的相对成本和收益的评估，使我们能够优先选择更好的选择，而不是更差的选择。同样的框架将被用来测试帕金森氏症患者在启动眼跳时出现的问题是否源于成本/收益评估的崩溃。通过了解这样一个简单但普遍的决策过程是如何驱动的，研究人员希望揭示大脑中决策制定的更基本和更一般的原则。更广泛地说，了解大脑如何在动态环境中实现最佳行为，是神经科学中的一个关键问题，也是在这个过程出错时进行干预的一个关键问题。弄清帕金森氏症的这些过程可能会导致对疾病发生和发展的更好的诊断测试。

Should I stay or should I go now? The clash between changing and staying the course is a very familiar choice in our everyday lives be it a trivial choice such as leaving a social event, or a 'big life choice' such as leaving one's job. This project hypothesizes that this type of decision underpins our most frequent choice: where to look next. On average, we move our eyes in discrete jumps (saccades) twice as often as we beat our hearts. Although this feels very automatic, each movement involves a mostly unconscious decision of when to move. Should I continue to exploit my maximum resolution vision on my current focal point, or is now the time to explore new regions of space? There are also costs as well as benefits to moving, since the visual disturbance during the movement (think major camera shake) is perceptually suppressed, meaning we are mostly blinded during the 10% of our waking lives spent making these movements. This project tests the novel hypothesis that saccade choices are governed by an evaluation of their relative costs and benefits, allowing us to prioritize better choices over worse ones. The same framework will be applied to test if the problems in initiating saccades seen in Parkinson's disease are due to a breakdown in a cost/benefit evaluation. By understanding how such a simple, but pervasive, decision process is driven, the investigators expect to reveal more fundamental and general principles of decision making in the brain. Understanding how the brain achieves optimal behavior in dynamic environments, more broadly, is a critical issue in neuroscience and for intervening when this process goes awry. Clarifying these processes in Parkinson's disease could lead to better diagnostic tests of disease onset and progression.