The role of behavioral attention in the planning of saccades
Mentor 1
Wendy Huddleston
Start Date
16-4-2021 12:00 AM
Description
Imagine picking up your phone in the morning; this is a task that nearly everyone performs throughout the day, but we still do not know how the brain processes this simple task. We are interested in how people use vision to plan movement and the role attention plays in that process. We track this by looking at saccades- a rapid movement of the eyes. The data we collect will be used to determine the accuracy of saccades and if they change when the visual task becomes more difficult. The stimulus consists of four dots in the upper right quadrant of the screen, within those dots, one is labeled A and one is B. In the middle of the screen is a constantly changing letter (125 ms), every 3-5 seconds the letter A or B appears in the letter stream. Participants move their gaze to the corresponding target. The participants completed 10 trials to each target location (A and B) at five degrees of target separation (3,6,8,10, and 12 degrees). We hypothesized that participants would stop planning two separate saccades when the two targets were unable to be perpetually separated through attentional processes, and that this threshold would be individual-specific. So far, we have concluded that there is not one saccade trajectory, but two. Meaning, there is one saccade per letter (A and B) within every degree of target separation. The information that we collect will be used in future research to analyze the areas of the brain that are involved in behavioral attention. This is how we determine if the size of the attentional window, as measured in brain activation, corresponds to participants ability to plan two separate saccade trajectories with precision.
The role of behavioral attention in the planning of saccades
Imagine picking up your phone in the morning; this is a task that nearly everyone performs throughout the day, but we still do not know how the brain processes this simple task. We are interested in how people use vision to plan movement and the role attention plays in that process. We track this by looking at saccades- a rapid movement of the eyes. The data we collect will be used to determine the accuracy of saccades and if they change when the visual task becomes more difficult. The stimulus consists of four dots in the upper right quadrant of the screen, within those dots, one is labeled A and one is B. In the middle of the screen is a constantly changing letter (125 ms), every 3-5 seconds the letter A or B appears in the letter stream. Participants move their gaze to the corresponding target. The participants completed 10 trials to each target location (A and B) at five degrees of target separation (3,6,8,10, and 12 degrees). We hypothesized that participants would stop planning two separate saccades when the two targets were unable to be perpetually separated through attentional processes, and that this threshold would be individual-specific. So far, we have concluded that there is not one saccade trajectory, but two. Meaning, there is one saccade per letter (A and B) within every degree of target separation. The information that we collect will be used in future research to analyze the areas of the brain that are involved in behavioral attention. This is how we determine if the size of the attentional window, as measured in brain activation, corresponds to participants ability to plan two separate saccade trajectories with precision.
