Prediction of position and motion during saccadic and smooth pursuit eye movements

In Project A1 we will be focus on natural eye movement behavior in complex natural and virtual environments. We plan to investigate how our visual system exploits semantic context information to guide predictive oculomotor behavior during tasks in natural surroundings. We will identify basic visuomotor routines consisting of spatially and temporally defined eye movement patterns to solve tasks of different complexities: eye movements of an observer viewing a dynamic scene, when moving around in an otherwise static scene or interacting within a scene. This approach towards natural settings will be complemented by neurophysiological and oculomotor studies in the head-unrestrained macaque monkey and by determining the role of visual context in eye movement sequences and their neural correlates.