LabStats

  1. Why metastability is a natural language for gaze behavior The idea that perception, attention, and neural activity evolve through transiently stable states has deep roots in cognitive science and neuroscience. Concepts such as attractors , basins , noise‑induced transitions , and escape times appear in work on perceptual switching, decision‑making, and neural population dynamics (Kelso, 1995; Rabinovich et al., 2008; Deco & Jirsa, 2012). Eye movements, especially the alternation between fixations and saccades ,   fit remarkably well into this metastable picture. The Freidlin–Wentzell theory of rare events (Freidlin & Wentzell, 2012) provides a rigorous mathematical language for these intuitions. 2. Fixations as metastable states  Consider the gaze position X t as the state of a stochastic dynamical system. During a fixation the  gaze remains confined to a small region, microsaccades and noise generate small fluctuations, and the gaze tends to return...

A large consensus in literature indicates that the cerebellum not only integrates and process sensory and motor information, but it is also involved in sensorimotor learning and control ( Doya, 2000 ; Gao et al ., 1996 ). Complex sensorimotor functions that include cognitive processes in planning, attention, and language have also been reported to be mediated by the cerebellum ( Schmahmann, 1991 ; Thach, 1998 ; Kim, U ğ urbil, and Strick, 1994 ). Indeed, the cytoarchitectonic uniformity of the cerebellum would facilitate its ability to process sensory information ( Ramnani, 2006 ), while the existence of   connections from prefrontal and posterior parietal areas to the cerebellum gives evidence for its possibility to process abstract information too ( Ramnani, 2012 ; Koziol et al. , 2014 ). Moreover, it has been suggested that the lateral cerebellum would be implicated during the phase of acquisition and pre-processing (i.e., selection) of sensory information ( Gao et al, 1996...

Abstract : Eye movement is the simplest and repetitive movement that enables humans to interact with the environment. The common daily activities, such as reading a book or watching television, involve this natural activity, which consists of rapidly shifting our gaze from one region to another. In clinical application, the identification of the main components of eye movement during visual exploration, such as fixations and saccades , is the objective of the analysis of eye movements: however, in patients affected by motor control disorder the identification of fixation is not banal. This work  [ download ]  presents a new fixation identification algorithm based on the analysis of variance and covariance: the main idea was to use bivariate statistical analysis to compare variance over x and y to identify fixation. We describe the new algorithm, and we compare it with the common fixations algorithm based on dispersion. To demonstrate the performance of our approach, we t...

The eye movement system is closely related to cognitive functions such as perception, attention and memory. This is not surprising since eye movements provide the easiest and the most accurate way to extract information from our visual environment and the eye movement system largely determines what information is selected for further processing.   This would make the saccadic system an ideal model for studying the  decision-making  (DM) process  [1] .  In general, the study of DM has been carried out under three main approaches, that involve  economics ,  cognitive sciences  and  neurobiology . They differentiate on the base of their growing level of complexity  [2] .   Neuroeconomics  is a relatively recent field of interdisciplinary research that integrates those three approaches. The application of the methodologies and the results that typically own to the cognitive neuroscience, in order to build models grounded in neurob...