Eye Movements, Gaze Correction, and Visual Short-Term Memory

描述（由申请人提供）：人们每天进行数万次扫视眼球运动，其中很大一部分未能落在预期物体上。为了提高效率，视觉系统必须迅速纠正这些错误，并对预期对象进行校正扫视。先前的研究表明，在简单的实验室条件下，凝视校正是快速和自动的，其中只有一个物体存在。然而，在自然世界中，存在许多可能的注视目标，并且确定哪个对象是原始扫视目标通常将需要使用目标对象的记忆表示。然而，没有以前的研究试图证明，记忆是用来纠正扫视错误。在拟议的研究中，我们计划表明，眼跳目标的记忆确实用于纠正眼跳错误，这些纠正是快速，准确，自动的，甚至可能是无意识的。我们的中心假设是，视觉短期记忆（VSTM）存储目标信息的扫视，使目标物体可以区分其他可见物体和凝视可以有效地纠正。为了测试这个想法，我们开发了一个新的范例来模拟眼跳错误，其中刺激阵列在眼跳期间稍微移动，以便眼睛落在目标物体和干扰物物体之间。我们的初步研究结果表明，在这些条件下，基于记忆的凝视校正是准确的，快速的，自动的。拟议的工作将探索用于这些凝视校正的记忆表征的性质，包括（a）测试是否存储在VSTM中的记忆表征，（B）检查这些表征中存储了什么信息，（c）探索这些表征如何组合自下而上的感官信息，以及（d）确定表征是否包括有关附近其他物体的信息。这些研究将促进我们对凝视校正的基本机制的理解，这些机制支持与世界上的物体和代理的有效交互。大多数复杂的视觉任务（准备食物，驾驶）取决于固定一系列物体，而凝视校正在确保眼睛有效地指向目标相关物体方面起着重要作用。因此，拟议的研究将提供必要的信息，了解条件，涉及缺陷的控制凝视。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): People make tens of thousands of saccadic eye movements each day, and a substantial proportion of these fail to land on the intended object. To be efficient, the visual system must rapidly correct these errors and make a corrective saccade to the intended object. Previous research has shown that gaze correction is fast and automatic under simple laboratory conditions, in which only a single object is present. In the natural world, however, there are many possible gaze targets, and determining which object was the original saccade target will often require the use of a memory representation of the target object. However, no previous studies have attempted to demonstrate that memory is used to correct saccade errors. In the proposed research, we plan to show that memory for the saccade target is indeed used to correct saccade errors, and that these corrections are fast, accurate, automatic, and perhaps even unconscious. Our central hypothesis is that visual short-term memory (VSTM) stores target information across the saccade so that the target object can be discriminated from other visible objects and gaze can by efficiently corrected. To test this idea, we developed a new paradigm to simulate saccade error, in which a stimulus array is shifted slightly during a saccade so that the eyes land between the target object and a distractor object. Our preliminary results suggest that memory-based gaze correction under these conditions is accurate, fast, and automatic. The proposed work will explore the nature of the memory representations used for these gaze corrections, including (a) testing whether the memory representations are stored in VSTM, (b) examining what information is stored in these representations, (c) exploring how these representations are combined bottom-up sensory information, and (d) determining whether the representations include information about other nearby objects. These studies will advance our understanding of basic mechanisms of gaze correction that support efficient interaction with objects and agents in the world. Most complex visual tasks (preparing food, driving) depend on fixating a series of objects, and gaze correction plays an important role in ensuring that the eyes are directed efficiently to goal-relevant objects. Thus, the proposed research will provide essential information for understanding conditions that involve deficits in the control of gaze.