2024년 03월 26일 (화) 오후 10시

연사: Northeastern University 심리학과 권미영 교수님

제목: Brain adaptability in response to simulated central vision loss: Insights from oculomotor control and sensory processing
초록: Contrary to our perceptual impression, visual processing is not uniform across the visual field. For resolving fine spatial detail, humans rely exclusively on the fovea, the small, central-most region of the retina, where light-sensitive cells are densely packed. We move our eyes to direct the fovea to different parts of a scene, constructing a picture of the world around us. Outside the fovea, visibility progressively declines with eccentricity. For this reason, the consequences of losing this central portion of the retina are profound. In this talk, I will discuss how the visual system responds to drastic changes in visual inputs following the loss of foveal vision. Our research demonstrated that when foveal vision was disturbed by a simulated scotoma, human observers quickly adopted a region in the peripheral retina for guiding their eye movements (i.e., Preferred Retinal Locus, PRL). Our subsequent studies further revealed that the development of a PRL led to significant functional benefits, such as a reduction in crowding, increased reading speed, and improved spatial attention at the PRL. Furthermore, in fMRI studies of peripheral vision. This surprisingly fast and spontaneous adjustment of eye movements demonstrate remarkable visual and visuomotor plasticity while revealing basic guiding principles of oculomotor control and sensory processing. Furthermore, I will also discuss recent psychophysical and computational evidence elucidating the important computational constraints imposed by retinal ganglion cells during the early encoding stage of visual input.