Psychology Seminar Series - Cross-modal and emotional influences on visual cortex and eye movements

What we see is not just influenced by the information that arrives through our eyes, but also by information that comes from the other senses and the rest of the brain. I will give an overview over several studies from my lab showing how a variety of information from audition, action and emotion influences visual cortex, both in sighted and blind individuals, as well as how this information influences eye movements in the absence of visual awareness. For influences on visual cortex, we used fMRI and brain decoding techniques and demonstrated how non-visual information is represented in neural activity patterns of visual cortex in both sighted and blind individuals. For influences on eye movements, we used eye-tracking in combination with techniques that suppress stimuli from visual awareness and showed that the eyes are guided by consciously invisible images when they are strengthened by emotional or cross-modal information. Altogether, these studies show that visual cortex and its representations are shaped by a variety of cross-modal, emotional and semantic information.