Superior colliculus encodes visual saliency during smooth pursuit eye movements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The saliency map has played a long-standing role in models and theories of visual attention, and it is now supported by neurobiological evidence from several cortical and subcortical brain areas. While visual saliency is computed during moments of active fixation, it is not known whether the same is true while engaged in smooth pursuit of a moving stimulus, which is very common in real-world vision. Here, we examined extrafoveal saliency coding in the superior colliculus, a midbrain area associated with attention and gaze, during smooth pursuit eye movements. We found that SC neurons from the superficial visual layers showed a robust representation of peripheral saliency evoked by a conspicuous stimulus embedded in a wide-field array of goal-irrelevant stimuli. In contrast, visuomotor neurons from the intermediate saccade-related layers showed a poor saliency representation, even though most of these neurons were visually responsive during smooth pursuit. These results confirm and extend previous findings that place the SCs in a unique role as a saliency map that monitors peripheral vision during foveation of stationary and now moving objects.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".