Our lab just returned from participating in this year’s Gordon Research Conference on Eye Movements. The conference took place at Mount Holyoke College in New England.
We had a total of five presentations at the conference, which covered a broad range of topics related to eye movements.
First, Ziad gave a feature presentation about how foveal oculomotor state can, perhaps surprisingly, substantially influence extrafoveal visual sensitivity. This talk covered a span of more than 20 years of research on the topic, culminating in our newest ideas for the next set of scientific challenges that we need to tackle.
This talk set the stage for four poster presentations by Shweta, Yue, Wenbin, and Tanya.
Shweta and Yue described our continued efforts to compare superior colliculus (SC) and primary visual cortex (V1) neuronal activity. For example, Shweta looked at the biophysics of action potential (spike) generation in the two brain areas.
And, Yue described how the temporal filters of V1 neurons can be strongly image-dependent, whereas those of the SC are not. Moreover, the image-dependence of the V1 temporal filters reflects how likely image features are to “move” in natural dynamic scenes. For examples, far objects on the horizon tend to be dark and, by virtue of being far, move very little on the retina.
Wenbin and Tanya looked at active vision mechanisms. Wenbin described our curious observations of a complete lack of saccadic suppression in V1, but only for a specific type of visual stimulus. This discovery helps us understand what brain areas contribute to perceptual effects around the time of eye movements, with the surprising conclusion being that the SC generally reflects perception during saccadic suppression much better than V1! And, Tanya inactivated V1 to understand how other brain circuits and pathways contribute to visually-guided behavior, with very intriguing results about the role of the midbrain.
The highlight of the conference was the traditional lobster dinner on the last day!
