Dartmouth Events

Psychological and Brain Sciences Colloquium

Harris Fellow, Martin Rolfs, PhD, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Thursday, September 22, 2022
1:15pm – 2:15pm
Moore Hall B03
Intended Audience(s): Alumni, Faculty, Postdoc, Staff, Students-Graduate, Students-Undergraduate
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Please join us in ­­­Moore BO3 on Thursday, September 22, 2022, at 1:15 p.m., for a colloquium given by Harris Fellow, Dr. Martin Rolfs, Heisenberg Professor for Experimental Psychology: Active Perception and Cognition, Department of Psychology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Title and abstract are below. A virtual option to join will also be offered, and Zoom details will be forthcoming.

Title:  Sensory Consequences of Visual Actions

Abstract:  We use rapid eye, head, and body movements to change where we look. They shift the sensory surface (i.e., the retina) with respect to the external world to extract information from a new part of the visual scene upon each new gaze fixation. But the consequences of such visual actions go beyond their intended sensory outcomes. On the one hand, intrinsic consequences accompany movement preparation as covert internal processes (e.g., predictive changes in the deployment of visual attention). On the other hand, visual actions have incidental consequences, side effects of moving the sensory surface to its intended goal (e.g., global motion of the retinal image during saccades).

In this talk, I will present studies in which we investigated intrinsic and incidental sensory consequences of visual actions and their sensorimotor functions. First, we show that intrinsic consequences of eye-movement preparation anticipate the retinal changes that are about to occur. This anticipation involves spatially specific, foveal predictions of soon-to-be fixated visual features of the movement target. Second, we discovered that incidental consequences of saccadic eye movements can be used by the visual system to establish object correspondence across glances, and jump-start gaze correction upon saccade landing. These results provide insights into continuously interacting top-down and bottom-up sensory processes. On a more global level, they reify the necessity to study perception in connection to motor behavior that shapes its fundamental processes.

Photo Credit: @Kopf und Kragen

 

For more information, contact:
Michelle Powers
6036463181

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.