Alex and Daniela are attending the EPS Workshop on Oculomotor Readiness and Covert Attention organized by Dan Smith at University of Durham.
It was Alex first poster session – WELL DONE ALEX!
Summary of Daniela’s talk
Oculoproprioception
–
an eye position signal selective for coding the locus of attention?
The most commonly observed neural
representations for visual attention encode location relative to the direction
of gaze. Without information about the rotation of one’s own eyes in the orbits
cars around us in traffic or food on our plate would appear to change location
with every eye movement. Furthermore, gaze information is necessary to align visual
locations with sound or touch to enable cross-modal interactions. Despite
the importance of the gaze information in the brain’s representations for
spatial attention, the sources of this gaze input to the attention maps have
remained unknown.
There are two main signals of eye rotation. The
copy of the command sent to the extraocular muscles (corollary discharge, CD)
is predictive, therefore faster. The reafference from these muscles
(oculoproprioception, OP) is slower, but more accurate. In my talk I will
argue that these signals are used flexibly, depending on behavioral
goals. Locating objects relative to the body, for instance to guide a
pointing movement, relies mainly on the fast signal, CD. In contrast, OP seems
to be more important for perception, i.e, allocating attention in the
body-centered space.
