Chapter 8: Oculomotor Control and the Control of Attention

Question 1

conjugate eye movements

Answer 1

Movements of the two eyes in parallel (i.e., with the same vector).

Question 2

brainstem oculomotor nuclei

Answer 2

Neurons located at the rostrocaudal level of the superior colliculus whose axons innervate the muscles that control the position and movements of the eyes (the “extraocular muscles”)

Question 3

express saccades

Answer 3

Saccades with an onset latency that is roughly one half that of standard, volitionally triggered saccades; they are generated in response to the abrupts onset of an unexpected stimulus.

Question 4

antisaccade task

Answer 4

A task requiring a speeded saccade in the opposite direction of a temporally unpredictable target; it requires cognitive control to overcome the prepotent tedency to saccade to unexpected appearance of stimuli in the environment.

Question 5

salience map

Answer 5

A neural representation of the location of stimuli that are currently the most relevant for behavior.

Question 6

premotor theory of attention

Answer 6

The idea that attention may be a consequence of motor planning, covert attention being a motor plan that never gets realized as an actual movement.

Question 7

convolution (n. to convolve, v.)

Answer 7

The trasformation of a function (e.g, a time-varying signal) that results from passing it through a filter.

Question 8

machine learning

Answer 8

A branch of computuer science that studies how computer algorithms can learn about structure in a set of data.