Our lab has participated in this year’s virtual Vision Sciences Society (VSS) annual conference. We had a total of 4 presentations as follows (click on each image to see the video of the presentation):
1) Matthias Baumann gave a talk on the visual mechanisms underlying perceptual saccadic suppression. Perceptual suppression occurs equally well, and with the same dependencies on visual context, even in the absence of any saccades (as long as saccade-like image shifts occur on the retina).
2) Antimo Buonocore presented exciting results discovering visual pattern analysis capabilities by lower brainstem oculomotor control neurons. The discovery of visual pattern analysis capabilities by such late motor control structures in the brainstem is a critical prerequisite for successfully solving the sensory “race condition” that arises when an asynchronous sensory input arrives into the brain, irrespective of the brain’s exact internal state.
3) Ziad Hafed investigated whether it is true that the temporal code in the superior colliculus (SC) dictates the moment-to-moment kinematics of rapid eye movements. While the spatial code of the SC is relatively well understood, the role of the temporal code is still debatable, and it does not necessarily serve just the purpose of dictating moment-to-moment movement kinematics.
4) Finally, Ziad Hafed gave a symposium presentation on what we have learned about vision in the last 20 years from non-human primate neurophysiology investigations. Even under the strictest of experimental constraints, vision remains to be an active process, raising very important opportunities and challenges for understanding the functioning of the visual system in its “natural” operation.
