Eye Movements, Gaze Correction, and Visual Short-Term Memory

眼球运动、凝视校正和视觉短期记忆

• 批准号: 7079531
• 负责人: Andrew R Hollingworth
• 金额: $ 25.53万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-09-30 至 2011-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7079531
• 关键词: clinical research; eye movements; memory; role; saccades; short term memory

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): People make tens of thousands of saccadic eye movements each day, and a substantial proportion of these fail to land on the intended object. To be efficient, the visual system must rapidly correct these errors and make a corrective saccade to the intended object. Previous research has shown that gaze correction is fast and automatic under simple laboratory conditions, in which only a single object is present. In the natural world, however, there are many possible gaze targets, and determining which object was the original saccade target will often require the use of a memory representation of the target object. However, no previous studies have attempted to demonstrate that memory is used to correct saccade errors. In the proposed research, we plan to show that memory for the saccade target is indeed used to correct saccade errors, and that these corrections are fast, accurate, automatic, and perhaps even unconscious. Our central hypothesis is that visual short-term memory (VSTM) stores target information across the saccade so that the target object can be discriminated from other visible objects and gaze can by efficiently corrected. To test this idea, we developed a new paradigm to simulate saccade error, in which a stimulus array is shifted slightly during a saccade so that the eyes land between the target object and a distractor object. Our preliminary results suggest that memory-based gaze correction under these conditions is accurate, fast, and automatic. The proposed work will explore the nature of the memory representations used for these gaze corrections, including (a) testing whether the memory representations are stored in VSTM, (b) examining what information is stored in these representations, (c) exploring how these representations are combined bottom-up sensory information, and (d) determining whether the representations include information about other nearby objects. These studies will advance our understanding of basic mechanisms of gaze correction that support efficient interaction with objects and agents in the world. Most complex visual tasks (preparing food, driving) depend on fixating a series of objects, and gaze correction plays an important role in ensuring that the eyes are directed efficiently to goal-relevant objects. Thus, the proposed research will provide essential information for understanding conditions that involve deficits in the control of gaze.

描述（由申请人提供）：人们每天会进行数以万计的眼球扫视运动，其中很大一部分未能落在预期的物体上。为了提高效率，视觉系统必须快速纠正这些错误并对预期目标进行纠正扫视。先前的研究表明，在仅存在单个物体的简单实验室条件下，凝视校正是快速且自动的。然而，在自然世界中，存在许多可能的注视目标，并且确定哪个对象是原始扫视目标通常需要使用目标对象的记忆表示。然而，之前没有研究试图证明记忆可以用来纠正眼跳错误。在拟议的研究中，我们计划证明扫视目标的记忆确实用于纠正扫视错误，并且这些纠正是快速、准确、自动的，甚至可能是无意识的。我们的中心假设是，视觉短期记忆（VSTM）存储扫视过程中的目标信息，以便可以将目标对象与其他可见对象区分开来，并可以有效地纠正凝视。为了测试这个想法，我们开发了一种新的范例来模拟扫视误差，其中刺激阵列在扫视期间稍微移动，以便眼睛落在目标物体和干扰物体之间。我们的初步结果表明，在这些条件下基于记忆的凝视校正是准确、快速且自动的。拟议的工作将探索用于这些凝视校正的记忆表示的性质，包括（a）测试记忆表示是否存储在 VSTM 中，（b）检查这些表示中存储了哪些信息，（c）探索这些表示如何组合自下而上的感官信息，以及（d）确定这些表示是否包括有关其他附近物体的信息。这些研究将增进我们对注视矫正基本机制的理解，以支持与世界上的物体和代理的有效交互。大多数复杂的视觉任务（准备食物、驾驶）都依赖于注视一系列物体，而注视矫正在确保眼睛有效地瞄准与目标相关的物体方面发挥着重要作用。因此，拟议的研究将为理解涉及凝视控制缺陷的条件提供重要信息。