Form Properties of Moving Targets Bias Smooth Pursuit Target Selection in Monkeys

 Huixi Dou1,2 · Huan Wang1  · Sainan Liu1,3 · Jun Huang2  · Zuxiang Liu1,2,4 · Tiangang Zhou1,2,4 · Yan Yang1,2,4\
1 State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China 
2 Institute of Artifcial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, Hefei 230088, China 
3 Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China 4 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

Abstract

During natural viewing, we often recognize multiple objects, detect their motion, and select one object as the target to track. It remains to be determined how such behavior is guided by the integration of visual form and motion perception. To address this, we studied how monkeys made a choice to track moving targets with different forms by smooth pursuit eye movements in a two-target task. We found that pursuit responses were biased toward the motion direction of a target with a hole. By computing the relative weighting, we found that the target with a hole exhibited a larger weight for vector computation. The global hole feature dominated other form properties. This dominance failed to account for changes in pursuit responses to a target with different forms moving singly. These findings suggest that the integration of visual form and motion perception can reshape the competition in sensorimotor networks to guide behavioral selection.


Keywords
Global hole feature; Smooth pursuit eye movements; Sensorimotor transformation; Visual form perception; Visual motion perception; Monkeys