Departments of Neurobiology and Psychology, Jules Stein Eye Institute, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Curr Biol. 2010 Feb 9;20(3):R93-4. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.11.048.
Visual information is used by the brain to construct a conscious experience of the visual world and to guide motor actions [1]. Here we report a study of how eye movements and perception relate to each other. We compared the ability of human observers to perceive image motion with the reliability of their eyes to track the motion of a target [2], [3] and [4], the goal being to test whether both motor and sensory processes are based on the same set of signals and limited by a shared source of noise [2] and [4]. We found that the oculomotor system can detect fluctuations in the velocity of a moving target better than the observer. Surprisingly, in some conditions, eye movements reliably respond to the velocity fluctuations of a moving target that are otherwise perceptually invisible to the subjects. The implication is that visual motion signals exist in the brain that can be used to guide motor actions without evoking a perceptual outcome nor being accessible to conscious scrutiny.
视觉信息被大脑用于构建对视觉世界的有意识体验，并指导运动动作[1]。在这里，我们报告了一项关于眼动和感知如何相互关联的研究。我们比较了人类观察者感知图像运动的能力和他们的眼睛跟踪目标运动的可靠性[2]，[3]和[4]，目的是测试运动和感觉过程是否都基于相同的信号集，并受到共享噪声源的限制[2]和[4]。我们发现，眼球运动系统可以比观察者更好地检测到运动目标速度的波动。令人惊讶的是，在某些情况下，眼球运动可以可靠地响应运动目标的速度波动，而这些波动在感知上对受试者是不可见的。这意味着大脑中存在视觉运动信号，可以用于指导运动动作，而不会引起感知结果，也不会被有意识地审查。
