# Visual perception and the medial temporal lobes

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS · 2024 · $605,903

## Abstract

Summary:
 The overall goal of the proposal is to determine the role of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) in visual perception
and working memory. Although it is well established that the MTL is critical for long term episodic memory, recent work
has indicated that it also plays a critical role in visual perception and working memory, and that damage or age-related
changes to this brain region can disrupt our ability to accurately perceive the visual world around us, particularly when
encountering complex scenes such as when driving a car. However, the specific role that the MTL plays in supporting
visual perception is just beginning to be fully understood, and there is now a growing debate about when these deficits
will be observed, and which underlying brain processes are responsible. Answering these questions will have a
transformative effect on our understanding of visual cognition, and advance our knowledge about how various diseases
influence the human brain. In addition, they have important translational implications for a variety of populations
suffering from damage to different regions within the MTL such as patients with Alzheimer’s Disease, Schizophrenia,
depression, and even in healthy aged individuals.
 The current proposal will address these questions using a unique combination of psychophysical methods, novel
eye tracking approaches, studies of patients with focal MTL lesions, and high-resolution brain imaging methods in
healthy subjects. Psychophysical methods will be used in ‘same/different’, ‘change-detection’ and ‘flicker’ visual
discrimination tasks for scenes and objects in order to separate the processes involved during initial feature sampling
and those involved in supporting subsequent change detection, as well as allowing us to track how these processes
change as more information is sampled from the environment. The series of studies is designed to directly test the
predictions of competing theories, and, when possible, we pit the predictions of these different accounts against one
another. We will examine performance in healthy controls and in patients with focal MTL lesions in order to determine
whether regions in the MTL such as the hippocampus play a critical role in various perception conditions. Moreover, we
will utilize high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the role of hippocampal subfields as well as
the broader brain networks involved in perception. Importantly, these methods will be combined with novel analytic
approaches to quantifying eye movements to determine how the visual system samples information from the
environment (e.g., examining saccadic dispersion, visual resampling, as well as meaning- and salience-sampling), and
using novel fixation-related brain imaging methods to identify the neural circuitry that is critical for accurate visual
perception.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10869131
- **Project number:** 1R01EY035249-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS
- **Principal Investigator:** Andrew P Yonelinas
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $605,903
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2024-07-01 → 2029-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10869131

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10869131, Visual perception and the medial temporal lobes (1R01EY035249-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-21 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10869131. Licensed CC0.

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