ANR ShootingStar (2021-2025)

In a nutshell: The natural visual environments in which we have evolved have shaped and constrained the neural mechanisms of vision. Rapid progress has been made in recent years in understanding how the retina, thalamus, and visual cortex are specifically adapted to processing natural scenes. Over the past several years it has, in particular, become clear that cortical and retinal responses to dynamic visual stimuli are themselves dynamic. For example, the response in the primary visual cortex to a sudden onset is not a static activation, but rather a propagating wave. Probably the most common motions in the retina are image shifts due to our own eye movements: in free viewing in humans, ocular saccades occur about three times every second, shifting the retinal image at speeds of 100-500 degrees of visual angle per second. How these very fast shifts are suppressed, leading to clear, accurate, and stable representations of the visual scene, is a fundamental unsolved problem in visual neuroscience known as saccadic suppression. The new Agence Nationale de la Recherche(ANR) project “ShootingStar” aims at studying the unexplored neuroscience and psychophysics of the visual perception of fast (over 100 deg/s) motion, and incorporating these results into models of the early visual system.