Our paper, "Stimulus representations in visual cortex shaped by spatial attention and microsaccades" was just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2420704122

#Attention #VisualAttention #SpatialAttention #VisualCortex #Microsaccades #Saccades #EyeMovements #Representation #Dynamics #ActiveCognition #ActiveSensing #Decoding #V4cortex #ITcortex #Pulvinar #Neuroscience #PNAS

On active sensing on the brown ghost knifefish, an electric fish:

"Why the brown ghost chirps at night"
Oboti et al. 2024
https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/88287

#neuroscience #ActiveSensing #ElectricFish

Why the brown ghost chirps at night

@marcwhoward oh I should clarify: my low prediction error is because I fully expect rich movement correlates brain wide, as we’ve seen with #corollarydischarge #activesensing especially #saccade related effects in #activevision. Movement initiation offers a path into the brains internal timing. Working back we can see ways in which neurons care more about their fellow neurons than they do about “the world out there”, and that sensing absent movement is more the exception than the rule. Animals are…animate. Plants….plant. Look at me all “brain inside out”. I try not to be too constructivist, but I Kant. No shade whatsoever to actually conducting the challenging experiments that measure and materialize this idea, and tell us more about how and where movement effects are seen!

@marcwhoward but is that result really a wow? #activesensing I’m not downplaying the empirical work whatsoever, just that it’s more of a QED, point made, and this specifically is how it looks, moreso than a shocking result. Full disclosure: I just scanned abstract and figures.

If anything, under restraint, it’s underrepresenting movement component (or, maybe, that signal is part of a corollary discharge mismatch. = “bearing down” feedback loop as the mouse fights the isometric contraction to move the head that just won’t offer the correct sensory feedback signal! Grrr…mmmph…arrrrgh, ok fine….lick.)

#OldNeuroPapers #neuroscience #activesensing Microsaccades (outside of a coterie of researchers) are most often treated (and taken to be facts) by the larger neuroscience community as either "involuntary", "random", "fixational artifact", all to the end that they serve no functional purpose. While termed micro-saccades, the typical view is that they are distinct from and nothing like regular eye movements (saccades). However as far back as 1965, Zuber, Stark and Cook, publishing in Science suggest that they are indeed "micro" saccades: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5855207/ They write in the abstract: "... these movements are produced by a common physiological system, or the characteristics of the movements are determined by a single dynamically limiting element." which later, researchers like Hafed, Krauzlis, Martinez-Conde and others have experimentally shown have their neural origins in the superior colliculus or the frontal eye fields much like saccades. What purpose does such a delineation then serve? And even worse, treat them as artifacts instead of as important behavioral signatures/markers? After all, isn't one of the brain's functions to ensure that the body/organism moves and behaves in the environment?
Microsaccades and the velocity-amplitude relationship for saccadic eye movements - PubMed

The maximum velocities of microsaccades (flicks) are an increasing function of amplitude of movement. Measured velocities fall on the extrapolation of the curve of maximum velocity versus amplitude for voluntary saccades and involuntary corrective saccades. Hence all these movements are produced by …

PubMed
@PessoaBrain @SussilloDavid @cogneurophys @complexsystems Hmm, I agree about the importance of capturing #multisensory #ActiveSensing and #natural species typical #behavior. I would not agree that there has been little dev’t of these experiments except in rodents. (?!) In any event we need more! #neuroethology neuroscience