Jan Churan visits the lab

We had the pleasure of hosting Jan Churan from the University of Marburg.

Jan gave us an intriguing talk about exciting work that he is doing with Frank Bremmer and Markus Lappe. In this work, they have explored neural activity in area VIP around the time of saccades. The interesting twist was that they explored the neural substrates for our ability to know our heading direction when we are moving in our environment. During such movement, we visually experience an optic flow field whose motion properties depend on the heading direction. If we now make saccades during such optic flow field visual stimulation, does that alter our heading perception? In other words, does our representation of optic flow fields momentarily get altered around the time of saccades?  If so, how does it do so from the perspective of neural mechanisms? This is interesting work that extends studies of active vision to more naturalistic scenarios.