Department of Neuroscience, Psychology and Behaviour, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom.
Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Education, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
J Neurophysiol. 2021 May 1;125(5):1552-1576. doi: 10.1152/jn.00145.2019. Epub 2021 Mar 17.
People's eyes are directed at objects of interest with the aim of acquiring visual information. However, processing this information is constrained in capacity, requiring task-driven and salience-driven attentional mechanisms to select few among the many available objects. A wealth of behavioral and neurophysiological evidence has demonstrated that visual selection and the motor selection of saccade targets rely on shared mechanisms. This coupling supports the premotor theory of visual attention put forth more than 30 years ago, postulating visual selection as a necessary stage in motor selection. In this review, we examine to which extent the coupling of visual and motor selection observed with saccades is replicated during ocular tracking. Ocular tracking combines catch-up saccades and smooth pursuit to foveate a moving object. We find evidence that ocular tracking requires visual selection of the speed and direction of the moving target, but the position of the motion signal may not coincide with the position of the pursuit target. Further, visual and motor selection can be spatially decoupled when pursuit is initiated (open-loop pursuit). We propose that a main function of coupled visual and motor selection is to serve the coordination of catch-up saccades and pursuit eye movements. A simple race-to-threshold model is proposed to explain the variable coupling of visual selection during pursuit, catch-up and regular saccades, while generating testable predictions. We discuss pending issues, such as disentangling visual selection from preattentive visual processing and response selection, and the pinpointing of visual selection mechanisms, which have begun to be addressed in the neurophysiological literature.
人们通过注视感兴趣的物体来获取视觉信息。然而，信息处理能力是有限的，需要任务驱动和突显驱动的注意机制来从众多可用物体中选择少数几个。大量的行为和神经生理学证据表明，视觉选择和眼跳目标的运动选择依赖于共享的机制。这种耦合支持了 30 多年前提出的视觉注意的前运动理论，即视觉选择是运动选择的必要阶段。在这篇综述中，我们考察了在眼跳过程中观察到的视觉和运动选择的耦合在眼球追踪中得到了多大程度的复制。眼球追踪结合了急跳眼和平滑追踪来注视移动的物体。我们发现有证据表明，眼球追踪需要对移动目标的速度和方向进行视觉选择，但运动信号的位置可能与追踪目标的位置不一致。此外，当开始追踪时（开环追踪），视觉和运动选择可以在空间上分离。我们提出，视觉和运动选择的耦合主要功能是协调急跳眼和追踪眼球运动。我们提出了一个简单的竞争到阈值模型来解释在追踪、急跳眼和常规眼跳过程中视觉选择的可变耦合，同时生成了可测试的预测。我们讨论了悬而未决的问题，例如从非注意的视觉处理和反应选择中分离视觉选择，以及确定视觉选择机制，这些问题已经开始在神经生理学文献中得到解决。
