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)
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.
