Saccade Generation: BBS Call for Commentators

Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article on: A MODEL OF SACCADE GENERATION BASED ON PARALLEL PROCESSING AND COMPETITIVE INHIBITION by John M Findlay and Robin Walker This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please send EMAIL to: bbs(a)cogsci.soton.ac.uk or write to: Behavioral and Brain Sciences Department of Psychology University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/ http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/ ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/ ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/ gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator. An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection with a WWW browser, anonymous ftp or gopher according to the instructions that follow after the abstract. ____________________________________________________________________ A MODEL OF SACCADE GENERATION BASED ON PARALLEL PROCESSING AND COMPETITIVE INHIBITION John M Findlay Centre for Vision and Visual Cognition Department of Psychology University of Durham South Road Durham DH1 3LE England j.m.findlay(a)durham.ac.uk http://psynt.dur.ac.uk/staff/jmf/jmf.htm Robin Walker Department of Psychology Royal Holloway University of London Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX England robin.walker(a)rhbnc.ac.uk KEYWORDS: saccade, fixation, visual attention, salience, latency, model, competitive interaction, reciprocal inhibition, spatial selection, search selection. ABSTRACT: During active vision, the eyes continually scan the visual environment using saccadic scanning movements. This article presents a model for the human saccadic system. The model is described in terms of information processing and control with some close parallels to established physiological processes in the oculomotor system. The structure of the model consists of two separate pathways concerned respectively with the spatial and the temporal programming of the movement. A key aspect of the second pathway is the involvement of spatially distributed coding and the selection of the saccade target from a salience map. The two pathways descend through a hierarchy of levels, the lower levels operating automatically. An important feature is that visual onsets have automatic access to the eye control system via the lower levels. At various levels, centres in each pathway are interconnected via reciprocal inhibition. The model is used to account for a number of well-established phenomena observed in the study of target elicited saccades, notably: the gap effect, express saccades, the remote distractor effect and the global effect. High-level control of the pathways is discussed in relation to tasks such as visual search and reading. It is suggested that high level control operates through the two processes of spatial selection and search selection, which will generally combine in an automated way. Finally, some data from patients with unilateral neglect are examined in connection with the model. -------------------------------------------------------------- To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide Web or by anonymous ftp or gopher from the US or UK BBS Archive. Ftp instructions follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article. The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/ http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.findlay.html ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.findlay ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/Archive/bbs.findlay gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals To retrieve a file by ftp from an Internet site, type either: ftp ftp.princeton.edu or ftp 128.112.128.1 When you are asked for your login, type: anonymous Enter password as queried (your password is your actual userid: yourlogin(a)yourhost.whatever.whatever - be sure to include the "@") cd /pub/harnad/BBS To show the available files, type: ls Next, retrieve the file you want with (for example): get bbs.findlay When you have the file(s) you want, type: quit