Integration processes of oculomotor memory in the normal and pathological brain

Vision is an extremely important sense, and the eye movements that allow us to make use of it involve neural pathways across most major areas of our brain. The wide distribution of these pathways has made the study of eye movements a valuable window into the inner workings of our brains. In this thesis, we investigate the eye movements of healthy and pathological participants, first to validate and challenge a current theoretical and computational model of these movements, then to further our understanding of complex disorders that can affect the brain. In particular, we first investigate model-driven predictions by presenting participants with noisy visual information, in the form of a moving target having a Gaussian distribution of luminosity, and with variable levels of prior information about target motion. Through this, we validate a prediction of our reference model by showing reliability-weighted integration of visual and memory inputs in the control of eye movements. Then, we expand our investigation to pathological participants presenting one of two disorders thought to compromise brain areas involved in this process: either a developmental disorder that affects visual processing, amblyopia, or a degenerative disorder affecting the control of behavior and speech, fronto-temporal dementia. Using healthy participants as a reference, we discuss their performance in eye-movements tasks, highlight specific deficits, then draw parallels with the brain areas involved and our reference model.