Abstract
Presentation Description :
Vision depends on motion: we see things either because they move or because our eyes do. What may be more surprising is that large and miniature eye motions help us examine the world in similar ways–largely at the same time. In this presentation, I will discuss recent research from my lab and others suggesting that exploration and gaze-fixation are not all that different processes in the brain. Our eyes scan visual scenes with a same general strategy whether the images are huge or tiny, or even when we try to fix our gaze. These findings indicate that exploration and fixation are not fundamentally different behaviors, but rather two ends of the same visual scanning continuum. They also imply that the same brain systems control our eye movements when we explore and when we fixate–an insight that may ultimately offer clues to understanding not only normal oculomotor function in the healthy brain, but also oculomotor dysfunction in neurological diseases that affect eye movements. This presentation will also include recent data from my lab indicating that primary visual cortical neurons respond differently to object motion versus motion from fixational eye movements.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.