Neuroscience Seminar Series :
Michele Rucci (Boston University, MA, USA)
‘Active vision: The inseparable link between perception and action’
Captation et conception vidéo: Service audiovisuel de Paris Descartes.
Video sur Média2Descartes.
Our eyes are never at rest. Rapid gaze shifts (saccades) occur 2-3 times per second, and we are normally not aware that eye movements continually occur even during the inter-saccadic periods of «fixation», the very periods in which visual information is acquired and processed.
In this talk, I will argue that the incessant motion of the eye is a critical information processing
stage: a computational element of an active sensorimotor strategy by which the visual system
processes spatial information in the temporal domain. I will review recent experimental and
theoretical findings to address three main questions: (1) How is spatial information encoded in the
modulations of luminance resulting from eye movements? (2) How is this information extracted
and interpreted? (3) Can this stage of processing be tuned to the task via motor control? The
proposal that the visual system actively represents space through time replaces the traditional
notion of the early visual system as a passive encoding stage that optimizes overall information
transmission with that of an active, tunable system for feature extraction, whose function can be
fully understood only in conjunction with eye movements. It implies that motor behavior is in
part responsible for fundamental properties of spatial vision that are, at present, solely attributed
to neural mechanisms.
Those interested in meeting with the speaker please contact collins.th@gmail.com
There is a free lunch for students and postdocs following the seminar. All are welcome and strongly encouraged to take advantage of this great opportunity. Please sign up here. If you have questions please contact Cécile Issard (cecile.issard [at] etu.parisdescartes.fr).