M-BIC lecture series; Marcus Missal

Full Professor, Institute of Neuroscience, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium

Title of the lecture: 'Oculomotor anticipation and impulsivity'

Abstract

Imagine yourself waiting for the traffic light to go green. Impulsivity could push you to accelerate the car when the light is still red. In contrast, temporally guided anticipation could lead you to accelerate right at the time the light goes green. Whether these two types of ‘early’ motor responses rely on the same or different neural processes is an open question. The first aim of the talk is to present an oculomotor approach to study early responses and how this can help to dissociate anticipation from impulsivity. This could help to understand impulsivity in neuropsychiatric diseases. However, we also frequently change between states. For instance, careful anticipation could follow an impulsive response that has led to an unfavorable outcome. The second aim of the talk is to present a Markovian approach of this transition between hypothetical ‘states’. We suggest that this conceptual approach could actually be a better tool to study the dynamics of cognition.