Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 2B4, Canada.
Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 2B4, Canada
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020 Apr 7;117(14):8203-8211. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1913851117. Epub 2020 Mar 24.
Most people easily learn to recognize new faces and places, and with more extensive practice they can become experts at visual tasks as complex as radiological diagnosis and action video games. Such perceptual plasticity has been thoroughly studied in the context of training paradigms that require constant fixation. In contrast, when observers learn under more natural conditions, they make frequent saccadic eye movements. Here we show that such eye movements can play an important role in visual learning. Observers performed a task in which they executed a saccade while discriminating the motion of a cued visual stimulus. Additional stimuli, presented simultaneously with the cued one, permitted an assessment of the perceptual integration of information across visual space. Consistent with previous results on perisaccadic remapping [M. Szinte, D. Jonikaitis, M. Rolfs, P. Cavanagh, H. Deubel, 116, 1592-1602 (2016)], most observers preferentially integrated information from locations representing the presaccadic and postsaccadic retinal positions of the cue. With extensive training on the saccade task, these observers gradually acquired the ability to perform similar motion integration without making eye movements. Importantly, the newly acquired pattern of spatial integration was determined by the metrics of the saccades made during training. These results suggest that oculomotor influences on visual processing, long thought to subserve the function of perceptual stability, also play a role in visual plasticity.
大多数人可以轻松地学习识别新的面孔和地点，并且通过更多的实践，他们可以成为放射诊断和动作视频游戏等复杂视觉任务的专家。这种感知可塑性在需要持续固定的训练范式的背景下得到了深入研究。相比之下，当观察者在更自然的条件下学习时，他们会频繁地进行眼跳。在这里，我们表明这种眼跳可以在视觉学习中发挥重要作用。观察者执行一项任务，在该任务中，他们在辨别提示视觉刺激的运动的同时进行眼跳。同时呈现的其他刺激允许评估跨视觉空间的信息感知整合。与先前关于 peri-saccadic 重映射的结果一致[M. Szinte、D. Jonikaitis、M. Rolfs、P. Cavanagh、H. Deubel，116，1592-1602(2016)]，大多数观察者优先整合代表提示的前眼跳和后眼跳视网膜位置的信息。通过对眼跳任务进行广泛的训练，这些观察者逐渐获得了无需进行眼动即可执行类似运动整合的能力。重要的是，新获得的空间整合模式是由训练期间进行的眼跳的度量决定的。这些结果表明，长期以来被认为服务于感知稳定性的眼球运动对视觉处理也有影响，也在视觉可塑性中发挥作用。
