Levels of cognitive organization in human eye movements

• Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Sebastian Pannasch
• Fachliche Zuordnung: Allgemeine, Kognitive und Mathematische Psychologie
• Förderung: Förderung von 2009 bis 2010
• Projektkennung: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 157372902

Visual perception is essential for the interaction with our environment and requires various types of eye movements. Clear and stable vision is limited to the small foveal region (ca. double the size of a thumbnail) and to the time of fixations (when the eyes are relatively stable). During fast saccadic eye movements the fovea is brought from one point to another and our vision is mainly suppressed. Characteristics in the interplay of fixations and saccades as well as in brain activity have been separately investigated in relation to basic, reflexlike mechanisms (e.g. the presentation of sudden visual changes) and higher cognitive functions, such as localization and identification of objects. The proposed research aims to further investigate these mechanisms by combining eye-tracking and Magnetencephalography (MEG) during free visual exploration of images. The results will make significant contributions to better understand eye movement control (in general and at the level of single fixations) and their relation to the hierarchical cognitive organization. More specifically, it will be examined 1) what are the neurophysiological mechanisms and involved brain regions responsible for the distractor effect, 2) if and how can different stages of processing expressed in distinct eye movement characteristics explained by the underlying brain activity and 3) how can both research lines be connected as a paradigm for an online probing of different processing modes?

• DFG-Verfahren: Forschungsstipendien
• Internationaler Bezug: Finnland
• Gastgeberin: Professorin Dr. Riitta Hari