Talk Abstract: When looking around a visual scene, humans make saccadic eye movements to fixate objects of interest. While the extraocular muscles can execute saccades in any direction, not all saccade directions are equally likely: saccades in horizontal and vertical directions are most prevalent. Here, we asked if head orientation and scene orientation affect the saccade direction biases. Our combined results appear to indicate a combined effect of two reference frames in saccade generation, one egocentric which appears to dominate for small saccades and in the absence of visual cues for orientation and another allocentric one that biases the saccades along the orientation of the image. In between every pair of saccades there is a period fixation where the eye is relatively still. While the eye movements that occur during these fixation periods have often been described as random, we show that they have systematic biases that depend on where the subject is looking at. Finally, we will show results illustrating how our gaze holding system is adaptable and it may respond to the statistics of our behavior or the environment.

Speaker Biography: Jorge Otero-Millan is Assistant Professor of Optometry and Vision Science at UC Berkeley and Adjunct Assistant Professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins University. His laboratory aims to understand how and why we move our eyes and how eye movements affect visual perception. Then, they apply their findings on improving the use of eye movements in diagnosing patients with eye, brain, or ear disorders. He received his BSc in Telecommunication Engineering from University of Vigo in Spain in 2006 and his PhD in Neuroscience from University of Vigo in collaboration with the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, AZ in 2013. Following a postdoc at Hopkins, he joined the faculty of UCB School of Optometry in 2020.