Title: New perspective on visual attention

Speaker: Dr. Rich Krauzlis (Senior Investigator, Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research, National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health)

Introduction to Dr. Rich Krauzlis:

Rich Krauzlis earned his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and doctorate in Neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco, in Steve Lisberger’s laboratory. After postdoctoral training with Fred Miles and Bob Wurtz at the National Eye Institute, he was recruited to the Salk Institute in 1997, where he was promoted to Full Professor in the Systems Neurobiology Laboratory. In 2011, Rich returned to the National Eye Institute as a Senior Investigator in the Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research and Chief of the section on Eye Movements and Visual Selection.Work in Rich’s laboratory is aimed at understanding the brain mechanisms that link motor control to sensory and cognitive processing, using a variety of techniques to manipulate and monitor neural activity. One key result from his lab’s work is that the superior colliculus (SC), a structure on the roof of the midbrain best known for its role in the motor control of orienting movements, contains a “priority map” that keeps track of behaviorally relevant objects in the visual field. Activity in this map is important for deciding where and when to look, but also plays a crucial role in selecting which signals are taken into account when making perceptual judgments, even in the absence of orienting movements.Rich’s vita includes papers on pursuit and saccadic eye movements, physiological studies of the superior colliculus, cerebellum, and cerebral cortex, psychophysical studies of visual motion perception and visual attention, and computational modeling of eye movements. He has authored several review articles on eye movements, including a chapter in the graduate textbook Fundamental Neuroscience. He also serves on the Editorial Boards for Journal of Neuroscience and Journal of Vision and is a Senior Editor for Vision Research.

Time: November 10 2015 (Tue) 13:00-15:00

Venue: Room 1113, Wangkezhen Building, Peking University

Abstract:

Attention is commonly believed to be controlled by a network of areas in the cerebral cortex, with frontal and parietal cortex regulating limited resources available in the sensory areas of cortex. However, subcortical structures like the superior colliculus also play a role in attention, and in this talk I will explain how our investigation of the superior colliculus has led us to a very different view of how attention is controlled. I will present evidence that the superior colliculus plays a crucial role in the control of spatial attention, but surprisingly, the mechanisms used by the superior colliculus appear to be independent of the well-known signatures of spatial attention in visual cortex. These recent results demonstrate that processes beyond the well-known correlates in extrastriate cortex play a major role in visual spatial attention. Furthermore, based on recent results from fMRI and physiology experiments in my lab, as well as clues from neuroanatomy and disorders of attention, I speculate that the brain mechanisms for attention are based on an evolutionarily conserved ciruit motif that predates the emergence of the neocortex.