The eyes anticipate where objects will move based on their shape

Curr Biol. 2023 Sep 11;33(17):R894-R895. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2023.07.028.ABSTRACTImagine staring into a clear river, starving, desperately searching for a fish to spear and cook. You see a dark shape lurking beneath the surface. It doesn't resemble any sort of fish you've encountered before - but you're hungry. To catch it, you need to anticipate which way it will move when you lunge for it, to compensate for your own sensory and motor processing delays1,2,3. Yet you know nothing about the behaviour of this creature, and do not know in which direction it will try to escape. What cues do you then use to drive such anticipatory responses? Fortunately, many species4, including humans, have the remarkable ability to predict the directionality of objects based on their shape - even if they are unfamiliar and so we cannot rely on semantic knowledge about their movements5. While it is known that such directional inferences can guide attention5, we do not yet fully understand how such causal inferences are made, or the extent to which they enable anticipatory behaviours. Does the oculomotor system, which moves our eyes to optimise visual input, use directional inferences from shape to anticipate upcoming motion direction? Such anticipation is necessary to stabilise the moving object on the high-resolution fovea of the retina while tracking the shape, a primary goal of the oculomotor system6, and to guide any future interactions7,8. Here, we leveraged a well-known behaviour of the ocul...

Source: Current Biology - September 12, 2023 Category: Biology Authors: Emma E M Stewart Roland W Fleming Source Type: research