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People/Faculty
Peter H. Schiller, Ph.D.
Dorothy W. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Building: 46-6041
Lab: Schiller Lab
Email: phschill@mit.edu

Visual and Oculomotor Systems
Research in the Schiller laboratory is concerned with the functions of the mammalian visual and oculomotor systems. The work is carried out predominantly on primates and involves single-cell recordings, microstimulation, lesions and reversible inactivation of selected brain regions. Research on the visual system presently centers on the question of how we perceive objects and how we can analyze depth information. The work on the oculomotor system examines the role of various cortical areas in the generation of eye movements during visually guided target selection.

The Neural Control of Vision
Among the senses, the brain of primates devotes most space to the analysis of vision. In addition to the numerous subcortical regions, in the cortex more than 30 thirty visual areas have been identified. The analysis of the visual scene is a complex undertaking; we are only now starting to learn about how the brain goes about performing this job. We typically identify several basic aspects of visual analysis that includes the perception of color, brightness, motion, depth, texture, and shape . Whether there are separate brain areas specifically devoted to the analysis of each of these attributes is still unclear. It appears now that most visual areas in cortex actually co-processes several different visual attributes; consequently why we have so many cortical areas for vision is still a largely unsolved question.

In the Schiller Lab, the workings of the visual system have been studied for many years. Using behavioral and physiological methods, the research is carried out both in animals and in patients who have suffered infarcts in various brain structures.

The Neural Control of Visually Guided Eye Movements
The retina is specialized in having only a small region of tightly packed photoreceptors called the fovea. This region affords high-acuity vision. To be able to see fine detail in the visual scene, we therefore have to repeatedly shift the direction of our gaze.

Two general classes of eye movements have been distinguished: Conjugate eye movements and vergence eye movements. Conjugate eye movements are of two types: saccadic and smooth pursuit.

For the most part, different neural mechanisms control saccadic and smooth pursuit eye movements. Research in the Schiller Lab is concerned predominantly with the neural control of visually guided saccadic eye movements.

P.H .Schiller and C.E. Carvey, The Hermann grid illusion revisited. (2005) Perception, 34, 1375-1397

P.H. Schiller and E.J. Tehovnik, Neural mechanisms underlying target selection with saccadic eye movements. (2005) Prog Brain Res ,149, 157-171.

E.J. Tehovnik, W.M. Slocum, C.E. Carvey, and P.H. Schiller, (2005) Phosphene induction and the generation of saccadic eye movements by striate cortex. J. Neurophysiol., 93, 1-19.

P.H. Schiller and C.E. Carvey, Demonstrations of spatio-temporal integration and what they tell us about the visual system. (2006) Perception , 35, 1521-1555.

P.H. Schiller. W.M. Slocum and V.S. Weiner, How the parallel channels of the retina contribute to depth processing. (2007) Eur J Neurosci. 26, 1307-1321.