Seeing by Moving: The Inseparable Link Between Perception and Action

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 for understanding the normal functioning of the visual system, the effects of abnormal oculomotor behavior, and the development of visual prostheses.

More about the speaker, Michele Rucci

Michele Rucci is a Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Neuroscience and member of the Center for Visual Science at the University of Rochester.  He received a Laurea (MA) degree from the University of Florence and a PhD degree from the Scuola Superiore S. Anna, both in biomedical engineering. He was then a Fellow in Computational Neuroscience at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego and Professor in Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University.  His research integrates experimental and theoretical approaches to elucidate the computational mechanisms of human visual perception.  Research in his laboratory has revealed novel contributions from eye movements to spatial vision, has raised specific hypotheses on the influences of eye movements in visual encoding and development, has resulted in new methods for eye-tracking and gaze-contingent display control, and has led to robots directly controlled by neural models of sensorimotor pathways.