Neural Mechanisms for Perceiving Object Motion During Self-Motion

 描述（由申请人提供）：感知我们环境中物体的运动对日常生活的许多方面都至关重要。虽然我们对视觉运动感知的神经基础已经有了很多了解，但几乎所有的知识都来自于观察者的眼睛、头部和身体保持静止的实验。当观察者在环境中移动时，物体在视网膜上的运动取决于物体在世界中的运动和观察者的自我运动。因此，为了估计世界上物体的运动，必须将自运动考虑到计算中。这种能力对于驾驶车辆等日常活动至关重要，在此期间，准确判断环境中其他物体（如其他车辆或行人）的运动非常重要。由于自我运动的感知在神经系统疾病如阿尔茨海默病和正常衰老过程中会退化，因此了解自我运动过程中物体运动感知的神经基础对于开发这些缺陷的治疗方法至关重要。我们提出了一系列的实验，提供了第一个系统的探索的神经机制的物体运动知觉在自我运动。目标#1探索视觉机制，通过该机制，光流可以被解析为与自运动和物体运动相关的组件。行为研究已经证明了流解析的感知后果，但神经基础是未知的。我们测试的假设retinotopic运动区域的神经元的反应介导流解析的感知效果的目标#2采用了一种新的行为范式，其中猕猴被训练来判断物体运动过程中的自我运动，并报告他们的感知在世界为中心或以头为中心的坐标。我们假设，视觉和前庭自我运动信号作出重要贡献的感知对象的运动。通过在执行该任务期间从多个大脑区域中的神经元进行记录，我们寻求识别用于在以世界为中心或以头部为中心的坐标中灵活地表示对象运动的计算的神经相关性。拟议的研究与国家眼科研究所的斜视、弱视和视觉处理项目的研究优先事项直接相关。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Perceiving the motion of objects in our environment is critical to many aspects of daily life. Although much is known about the neural basis of visual motion perception, almost all of that knowledge is derived from experiments in which the observer's eyes, head, and body remain stationary. When an observer moves through the environment, the motion of an object on the retina depends on both the movement of the object in the world and the self-motion of the observer. Thus, to estimate the motion of objects in the world, self-motion must be factored into the computations. This capability is critical to daily activities such as driving a vehicle, during which it is important to accurately judge the movement of other objects in the environment, such as other vehicles or pedestrians. As perception of self-motion is known to be degraded in neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and during normal aging, understanding the neural basis of object motion perception during self-motion is of substantial importance to developing therapies for these deficits. We propose a series of experiments that provides the first systematic exploration of the neural mechanisms of object motion perception during self- motion. Aim #1 explores visual mechanisms by which optic flow may be parsed into components related to self-motion and object motion. Behavioral studies have demonstrated perceptual consequences of flow parsing, but the neural basis is unknown. We test the hypothesis that responses of neurons in retinotopic motion areas mediate the perceptual effects of flow parsing Aim #2 employs a novel behavioral paradigm in which macaques are trained to judge object motion during self-motion, and to report their percepts in either world-centered or head-centered coordinates. We hypothesize that both visual and vestibular self-motion signals make important contributions to perception of object motion. By recording from neurons in multiple brain areas during performance of this task, we seek to identify neural correlates of the computations that are used to flexibly represent object motion in either world-centered or head- centered coordinates. The proposed research is directly relevant to the research priorities of the Strabismus, Amplyopia, and Visual Processing program at the National Eye Institute.