Behavioral and neural investigations of spatiotemporal form integration in healthy and brain-injured persons In order to survive in a worid full of potentially life-threatening danger, the movement of objects in the visual scene must be rapidly detected and identified. Characterizing how the visual system constructs our perception of an object's form and motion is essential to understating how the visual system works in general. An understanding ofthe intact, normally functioning visual system is a fundamental starting place for diagnosing and treating the visual system when it is impaired or damaged. This proposal builds off of a growing body of evidence that our perception of a moving object is mediated by mutually interacting neural representations ofthe object's form and motion. This proposal investigates one unifying neural mechanism that may underiie such form-motion interactions: spatiotemporal form integration. Spatiotemporal form integration is the integration of neural representations of form features (i.e. the corners of an square) over space and time. The overall aim of this proposal is to investigate the properties and neural correlates of spatiotemporal form integration in mediating both form and motion perception and the possible application of this knowledge to the detection and identification of impaired neural processing in the visual system.
Specific aims 1 and 2 will investigate the roles and neural correlates of spatiotempoiral form integration in mediating form and motion perception.
Specific aim 3 will test the potential application of spatiotemporal form integration to serve as a metric dagnostic tool for detecting and identifying subtle neural damage and corresponding visual deficits. The project will take full advantage ofthe proposed Magnetic resonance imaging and Brain-lesioned patient database cores as well as the existing Nevada INBRE Bioinformatics core.
This project may reveal and quantify poorly understood characteristics of visual perception that are important for how we perceive and experience the worid around us. The proposed research has the potential to provde a framework for detecting visual deficits and associated neurological damage.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 94 publications
