Moving to see: the benefits of self---motion for visual perception

一个长期存在的问题是，大脑是如何将照射到视网膜上的光线模式转化为一个有意义的物体和动画世界，让观察者可以与之互动的。虽然在过去的几十年里，对大脑功能的理解取得了巨大的进步，但视觉信息处理和提取的基本原理仍然是难以捉摸的。这个项目建立在传统上以被动的方式研究感知的基础上，在获取视觉信息的过程中，对观察者的运动活动的关注相对较少。然而，像其他物种一样，人类并不是被动地暴露在传入的感官数据流中。相反，他们通过协调感觉处理和运动活动来积极寻找有用的信息。我们的激励假设是，自我运动是视觉感知的关键组成部分。考虑到一个简单的视觉几何问题，这个假设似乎是反直觉的。作为一个图像处理问题，它可能看起来违反直觉。考虑到几十年来关于大脑如何“补偿”自我运动的研究，这可能看起来也违反直觉。然而，从生物学的角度来看，这个假设是完全合理的，因为当观察者移动时，可以获得更多关于场景的信息。生态心理学家多年前就指出了这一点，最近在计算机视觉领域也得到了认可——它引起了范式的改变。我们认为，由自我运动产生的视觉、运动和本体感受信息是视觉处理的基础。该项目汇集了来自荷兰（阿姆斯特丹自由大学的布伦纳博士）、美国（波士顿大学的鲁奇博士）和英国（卡迪夫大学的拉什顿博士）的三个实验室，他们在分析人类不同类型的运动活动方面发展了重要的专业知识。我们将系统地研究人类观察者使用运动、本体感觉和全局光流信号来完成视觉任务的机制。阐明运动活动对知觉的影响对于提高我们对视觉系统功能的认识是至关重要的。这些知识还可以潜在地指导物体和环境的设计，为能够复制人类视觉功能的机器的构建提供信息，并可能为开发与病理状态下异常运动活动相关的视觉障碍的治疗提供科学依据。

Moving to see: the benefits of self-motion for visual perception A long-standing question is how the brain transforms the light patterns impinging onto the retina into a meaningful world of objects and animates with which the observer can interact. While enormous progress has been made in the understanding of brain functions during the last few decades, the fundamental principles underlying the processing and extraction of visual information remain elusive. This project builds on the observation that perception has been traditionally studied in a passive manner, paying relatively little attention to the observer's motor activity during the acquisition of visual information. Yet, like other species, humans are not passively exposed to the incoming flow of sensory data. Instead, they actively seek useful information by coordinating sensory processing with motor activity. Our motivating hypothesis is that self-movement is a critical component of visual perception. Considered as a problem of simple visual geometry this hypothesis might appear counter-intuitive. Considered as an image-processing problem it might appear counter-intuitive. Considered against decades of work concerned with how the brain "compensates" for self-movement it might also appear counter-intuitive. However, this hypothesis is fully plausible from a biological perspective, because more information about the scene is available when the observer moves. This was pointed out many years ago by ecological psychologists and has more recently been recognised in computer vision - where it has caused a paradigm change. We argue that the visual, motor, and proprioceptive information generated by self-movement is fundamental to visual processingThe project brings together three laboratories from The Netherlands (Dr. Brenner at VU University in Amsterdam), the US (Dr. Rucci at Boston University), and the UK (Dr Rushton at Cardiff University), which have developed critical expertise on the analyses of different types of motor activities in humans. We will systematically investigate the mechanisms by which human observers use motor, proprioceptive and global optic flow signals to accomplish visual tasks. Elucidating the perceptual impact of motor activity is critical to advancing our knowledge of how the visual system functions. Such knowledge can also potentially guide the design of objects and environments, inform the building of machines capable of replicating human visual functions, and it may provide a scientific basis for the development of treatments of visual impairments commonly associated with abnormal motor activity in pathological conditions.