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Neural selection and control of visually guided eye movements
1Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37240, USA. jeffrey.d.schall@vanderbilt.edu
Annual Review of Neuroscience
|April 15, 1999
Summary
Neural activity during perceptual and motor tasks explains reaction time. Visual processing time is constant, while response variability drives reaction time differences.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Science
- Computational Neuroscience
Background:
- Understanding the neural basis of decision-making is crucial for explaining behavior.
- Reaction times in perceptual and motor tasks are influenced by both stimulus processing and response generation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the neural correlates of perceptual and motor decisions.
- To determine if the duration of neural activity explains reaction time and its variability.
Main Methods:
- Review of studies on neural activity during visual target identification and gaze shift generation.
- Analysis of spatiotemporal activation patterns in the visual system.
- Examination of stochastic processes in movement-related activity.
Main Results:
- Visually evoked activation evolves spatiotemporally to identify target location.
- Movement-related activity grows stochastically towards a threshold for gaze shifts.
- Neural activity for perceptual processing is relatively constant for a given image.
Conclusions:
- The duration of neural processing for perception is fixed.
- Variability in response generation, not perceptual processing, accounts for reaction time variability.
- Neural correlates of decision-making provide insights into behavioral timing.