Invited talk: Michele Rucci (Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Director of the Active Perception Laboratory, Boston University, USA)

When:
2017-03-27 at 11:00

Where:
CHNO Quinze-Vingts - Salle Schiff (3rd floor)

Details:

TITLE:
Seeing by moving: The motor side of visual perception

ABSTRACT
Our eyes are never at rest. Rapid gaze shifts (saccades) occur 2-3 times per second, and smaller eye movements continually occur even during the inter-saccadic periods of "fixation", the very periods in which visual information is acquired and processed. Building upon a growing body of evidence, I will argue that eye movements, in addition to centering the high-acuity fovea, serve important information-processing functions: they are the computational tools of an active sensorimotor strategy by which the visual system transforms and processes spatial information in the temporal domain. This proposal contrasts with the traditional notion of the early visual system as a passive encoding stage and implies that oculomotor activity is in part responsible for fundamental properties of spatial vision currently attributed to neural mechanisms. I will review recent experimental and theoretical findings supporting this theory.