Les séminaires du Lundi accueillent le 1e Juillet Françoise VITU-THIBAULT Equipe SMP 

RDV à 11h dans la Salle S-203 (Bâtiment 7 à côté de l'Amphi Massiani)

Title : Ancestral visuo-motor computations in the midbrain underly readers’ oculomotor behavior across languages and writing systems

Saccades are the very brief movements of the eyes that intervene over 100,000 daily and without which a range of cognitive tasks, reading in particular, would be impossible. Commonly regarded as a window to the mind, they are assumed to be predominantly under top-down, cognitive/neocortical, control. In my talk, I will provide evidence to the contrary. Using MASC, our macaque model of the superior colliculus (SC), I will show that rudimentary visuo-motor computations, purportedly devoted to orienting reflexes, guide readers’ eye movements over lines of text in a wide variety of spaced alphabetic languages, as well as unspaced ideographic (Chinese and Japanese) scripts. I will then discuss how more sluggish cognitive/attentional processes possibly modulate, essentially through top-down projections to the SC, this default oculomotor behavior.