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Parallel recording of EEG and eye movements: Evidence for dorsal and ventral activities during free picture viewing

Thomas Fischer1*, S. Pannasch1, S.-T Graupner1, J. R. Helmert1 and B. M. Velichkovsky1
  • 1 Applied Cognitive Reserach Unit, Institute for Psychology III, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany

Visual processing has often been described in terms of two-pathway models (Ingle, Schneider, Trevarthen, & Held, 1967). Ungerleider and Mishkin (1982) proposed that primates’ vision is dominated by two distinct cortical mechanisms, dorsal and ventral pathways. The later model by Milner and Goodale (1995) related this idea to the current attentional state of the subject: A higher activation in the dorsal pathway is related to coarse exploration (i.e. spatial attention) whereas activity in the ventral pathway is associated to attention demanding tasks, such as identification of objects (i.e. selective attention) (Ungerleider, Courtney, & Haxby, 1998). In a recent study we could show that this distinction can also be found in connection to eye movement characteristics. Dorsal/ambient processing is expressed by short fixations together with long saccadic amplitudes whereas ventral/focal processing is rather indicated by long fixations and short saccades. Subsequent to the inspection of a visual scene we observed better results in a recognition task for accuracy and confidence if image cutouts were inspected by ventral related eye movement pattern than for those which are correlated to dorsal activity (Velichkovsky, Joos, Helmert, & Pannasch, 2005). Moreover, these findings are in line with the time course of scene inspection where an increase in the fixation duration was reported while saccadic amplitudes are decrease. This eye movement behaviour suggests a dominance of the dorsal system during the initial phase with a shift to ventral processing in later stages (Unema, Pannasch, Joos, Velichkovsky, 2005; Velichkovsky et al, 2005). Following this approach, we were interested in examining the time course of electrophysiological correlates while subjects freely viewed digitalized images of 18th century master paintings. Here we investigated the role of EEG oscillation in the gamma band (40-70Hz) to differentiate two modes of visual perception. With source localization (sLORETA) we could identify stronger high frequency activation (40-70 Hz) in cortical regions typically related to the dorsal pathway during an early stage of image inspection (1-5 sec.) as compared to a later stage (20-24 sec). Furthermore, fixation related synchronization for the 40-70Hz band was increased in the early stage (1-5 sec.) Our results yield further support for two distinct and successive stages of attention during free viewing of pictures.

References

1. Milner, A. D., & Goodale, M.-A. (1995). The visual brain in action. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

2. Unema, P. J. A., Pannasch, S., Joos, M., & Velichkovsky, B. M. (2005). Time course of information processing during scene perception: The relationship between saccade amplitude and fixation duration. Visual Cognition, 12(3), 473-494.

3. Ingle, D., Schneider, G., Trevarthen, C., & Held, R. (1967). Locating and identifying: Two modes of visual processing. A symposium. Psychologische Forschung, 31, 42-43.

4. Ungerleider, L. G., Courtney, S. M., & Haxby, J. V. (1998). A neural system for human visual working memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 95(3), 883-890.

5. Ungerleider, L., & Mishkin, M. (1982). Two cortical visual systems. In D. J. Ingle, M. A. Goodale & R. J. W. Mansfield (Eds.), Analysis of visual behavior (pp. 549-586). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

6. Velichkovsky, B. M., Joos, M., Helmert, J. R., & Pannasch, S. (2005). Two visual systems and their eye movements: Evidence from static and dynamic scene perception. In B. G. Bara, L. Barsalou & M. Bucciarelli (Eds.), Proceedings of the XXVII Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2283-2288). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Conference: 10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience, Bodrum, Türkiye, 1 Sep - 5 Sep, 2008.

Presentation Type: Poster Presentation

Topic: Perceptual Processing and Recognition

Citation: Fischer T, Pannasch S, Graupner S, Helmert JR and Velichkovsky BM (2008). Parallel recording of EEG and eye movements: Evidence for dorsal and ventral activities during free picture viewing. Conference Abstract: 10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.01.349

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Received: 15 Dec 2008; Published Online: 15 Dec 2008.

* Correspondence: Thomas Fischer, Applied Cognitive Reserach Unit, Institute for Psychology III, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany, thomas.fischer@tu-dresden.de