This title appears in the Scientific Report :
2012
Vision for Action: Exploring how visual inputs and motor outputs coordinate to create meaningful actions
Vision for Action: Exploring how visual inputs and motor outputs coordinate to create meaningful actions
Vision-for-action is defined as a distinct functional stream of brain processes which allows us to use complex perceptual processing for goal-directed actions (Goodale 2011). This concept was hypothesized together with Vision-for-Perception to suggest two relatively independent pathways in the brain...
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Personal Name(s): | De Haan, Marcel |
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Contributing Institute: |
Computational and Systems Neuroscience; INM-6 |
Imprint: |
2012
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Conference: | INT PhD-Day 2012, Marseille (France), 2012-12-13 - 2012-12-13 |
Document Type: |
Talk (non-conference) |
Research Program: |
Helmholtz Alliance on Systems Biology Signalling Pathways and Mechanisms in the Nervous System |
Publikationsportal JuSER |
Vision-for-action is defined as a distinct functional stream of brain processes which allows us to use complex perceptual processing for goal-directed actions (Goodale 2011). This concept was hypothesized together with Vision-for-Perception to suggest two relatively independent pathways in the brain that are responsible for visual processing (Ungerleider et al. 1982). The advent of fMRI studies allowed researchers to show that neurons in the dorsal stream play a central role in transforming visual information into the appropriate coordinates for motor acts (see for review; Sakata 2003). However, important questions relating vision to motor activity, and vice versa, have not been addressed. For example: How does visual information about the upcoming movement trajectory influence motor cortical activity? How do the visual input area and the motor output area interact to be continuously updated for correctly performing the tracking task? Observers and objects rarely stay in static relationship with one another and the egocentric location of a target object can often change radically at any moment. Therefore the reactions require coordinates for action immediately when the movements are to be performed. It is still unclear how the visual input system and the motor output systems coordinates to create a meaningful response. In the past, many cortical neurophysiology studies have examined the visual and motor modalities in isolation without regarding questions of cross-modal integration. The view that both systems work independently from each other by simply transferring the necessary information from the input to the output area, does not take into account that a tracking behavior requires a continuous update of both systems to be efficient. There is a large body of evidence in motor cortex that visual prior information about various aspects of the forthcoming movement influences strongly motor cortical activity long before movement execution (Confais et al. 2012; see for a review: Riehle 2005). Moreover, phasic spike synchrony is induced independently of firing rate modulations by the expectancy of a visual task-relevant stimulus (Riehle et al. 1997). Although only little is known about movement-relevant activity in early visual areas, it has been shown that neurons in visual area V4 change selectively their activity in relation to hand movement direction independent of the configuration of a visual stimulus (Mirabella et al. 2007). Furthermore, a recent study on free viewing monkeys has shown that the activation of the primary visual cortex (V1) by visual stimuli is coordinated by a top-down population signal evoked by the preceding saccadic eye movement (Ito et al. 2011). |