# Extrastriate Mechanisms of Visuospatial Perception During Eye Movements

> **NIH NIH R01** · UTAH STATE HIGHER EDUCATION SYSTEM--UNIVERSITY OF UTAH · 2022 · $369,813

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
We move our eyes thousands of times each day, adding up to over an hour of our waking perception. These
eye movements create considerable difficulties for the brain’s visual processing system, which must suppress
the induced motion of the visual scene caused by the eye movement and provide a stable visual perception
despite these discontinuities. How the visual system deals with the potentially disruptive consequences of our
frequent eye movements is a question with direct relevance for our everyday visual perception, and especially
to disorders in which eye movements are abnormal or the integration of information is impaired, such as
schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and autism spectrum disorders; the integration of
information across eye movements may be particularly important in reading, and potentially impaired in mental
disorders such as dyslexia. Aim 1 of this proposal develops a novel statistical approach capable of producing
an encoding model which captures the fast changes in neural sensitivity around the time of eye movements,
and linking this activity to a perceptual readout. This approach reveals a novel neurophysiological
phenomenon—persistent activity in response to stimuli appearing near the time of the saccade—which
contributes to integrating the visual scene across saccades. In Aim 2, we apply the same modelling framework
to the phenomenon of perceived changes in the location of visual stimuli around the time of saccades, and
measure this phenomenon behaviorally in nonhuman primates. The impact of Frontal Eye Field (FEF) activity
on the modulation of extrastriate neuronal responses during eye movements is causally tested using
pharmacological manipulation in Aim 3. The combination of psychophysical, electrophysiological,
computational, and causal manipulation techniques used in this proposal promises an unprecedented level of
insight into how our brain actively reconstructs the visual world three times a second to provide us with a stable
sense of the visual world during eye movements.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10376258
- **Project number:** 5R01EY031477-03
- **Recipient organization:** UTAH STATE HIGHER EDUCATION SYSTEM--UNIVERSITY OF UTAH
- **Principal Investigator:** Neda Nategh
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $369,813
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2020-06-01 → 2025-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10376258

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10376258, Extrastriate Mechanisms of Visuospatial Perception During Eye Movements (5R01EY031477-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10376258. Licensed CC0.

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