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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
Our eyes are never at rest. Even when we attempt to maintain fixation on a stationary point, microscopic eye movements keep the stimulus on the retina always in motion. This talk will focus on the effects of fixational eye movements on the visual input and on the neural encoding of visual information. I will argue that fixational eye movements are part of an encoding strategy, tuned to the characteristics of the natural world, which reformats spatial information into a temporal code. In a continually moving eye, this space-time transformation eliminates input redundancies before any neural processing takes place and starts the process of edge extraction already at the level of the retina. On the basis of behavioral and computational results, I will argue that that perception and motor behavior are more intimately tied than commonly thought: visual representations are intrinsically sensory-motor from the very early processing stages.
Host: Jennie Schei Disterhaupt