Séminaire de Michele Rucci 17/04/2025

Jeudi 17 avril 2024, à 15h, Salle Laurent Vinay, INT

Michele Rucci

Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Neuroscience and member of the Center for Visual Science at the University of Rochester

Active Space-Time Encoding: What One Sees Depends on How the Eyes Move

This talk explores how the human visual system constructs spatial representations. Unlike other sensory modalities, where spatial information must be inferred from incoming signals, vision begins with a sophisticated imaging system—the eye—that explicitly preserves spatial structure on the retina. This might suggest that human vision is primarily a passive spatial process, in which the eye simply transmits the retinal image to the cortex—much like uploading a digital photograph—to form a map of the scene. However, this analogy is misleading, as it overlooks the strong temporal sensitivity of visual neurons and contradicts theoretical models and experimental findings that examine vision in the context of natural motor behavior. Here, I will review recent evidence supporting active space-time encoding—the idea that, as with other senses, vision relies on motor strategies to encode spatial information in the temporal domain. This concept has important implications not only for understanding the normal functioning of the visual system and the effects of abnormal oculomotor behavior, but also for the development of vision science applications, including prosthetic devices.