Superior Colliculus Pathways for Looming and Threat

The superior colliculus is well known for its roles in visual orienting, oculomotor control, attention, and defensive behavior across species. Recently, we predicted and found that representations from a shallow convolutional neural network could predict defensive blinking to looming objects in infants and superior colliculus responses to optical expansion in adults. These findings suggest that the superior colliculus may coordinate defensive responses to looming in humans.

In this project, we tested whether the human superior colliculus functions in isolation during looming threat perception, or if it covaries with cortical networks involved in visual salience and object recognition. We used computational models of looming detection, visual saliency, and object recognition to predict patterns of superior colliculus BOLD response acquired as participants viewed a series of naturalistic videos or performed a working memory task, and to examine their functional connectivity with the rest of the brain. A detailed description of this work is forthcoming. This dataset provides the fMRI data used to conduct these analyses.