SACCADE TARGET SELECTION IN THE SUPERIOR COLLICULUS

所提出的实验是新颖的和创新的研究， 扫视目标区的神经基础。 实验联合收割机 McPeek博士研究visaul搜索中的扫视和注意力 用丘神经元的记录试图确定 这些神经元在目标选择中的作用。 这些实验依赖于 在一种引发方法中，发现扫视性乳酸 在连续的试验中减少相同的目标颜色。 改变目标颜色会增加等待时间， 有时是不寻常的扫视模式， 朝向旧颜色的扫视被打断， 仅在20毫秒暂停后启动。 候选人提议 在任务过程中监测丘的活动，并找出程度， 哪个神经活动对应于被关注的位置 干扰物与实际扫视目标。 之前的研究人员 研究了这类问题，但更简单，更 限制性行为任务。 这个提议似乎是一个 对现有工作的改进，因为洗涤剂和 扫视轨迹提供了注意力的行为证据， 干扰物 因此，更精确的眼跳分离-和 注意力相关的活动成为可能。

The proposed experiments are novel and innovative studies of the neural basis of saccadic target section. The experiments combine McPeek's doctoral work on saccades and attention in visaul search with recordings from collicular neurons in an attempt to determine the role of these neurons in target selection. The experiments rely on a priming method in which saccadic latencies are found to reduce over consecutive trials with the same target color. Changing the target color produces either an increase in latency or sometimes an unusual saccadic pattern in which a saccade directed toward the old color is interrupted and a new, correct saccade initiated after only a 20 msec pause. The candidate proposes to monitor collicular activity during the task and find out the extent to which neural activity corresponds to the location of attended distractors vs. the actual saccadic target. Prior investigators have examined questions of this sort but with simpler and more restrictive behavioral tasks. The proposal would seem to be an improvement over this prior work because the latencies and trajectories of saccades provide behavioral evidence of attention to the distractors. Thus, a more precise dissociation of saccade- and attention-related activity becomes possible.