How do wee see the world? Spontaneous brain dynamics predict individual visual exploration phenotypes

Over the last decades, the traditional view of the brain as a stimulus-response machine has been replaced by a new perspective that reconceptualizes bottom-up and top-down interactions. The brain is no longer considered only as a reflexive sensory-motor analyzer but also as a generator of predictive models, optimized during resting state endogenous activity to anticipate and interact with the environment more effectively. Notably, characteristics of spontaneous brain activity can predict eye movement dynamics during unconstrained viewing, reflecting an integration of top-down and bottom-up processing with endogenous dynamics, thus emphasizing the role of visual exploration as a window into the cognitive-behavioral functional organization of the brain. The aim of the present thesis is to replicate and validate the generalizability of previous findings shedding light on the link between oculomotor dynamics and endogenous brain processes. Specifically, a previous study (Zangrossi et al., 2021) found a low dimensionality of spatiotemporal dynamics of eye movements and identified distinct visual explorative phenotypes guiding spontaneous oculomotor dynamics both in free-viewing and resting state. Another study (Celli et al., 2022) utilized high-density EEG recordings to study the brain correlates of of visual exploration phenotypes that were previously highlighted. This study suggested that the viewing styles were related to different patterns of spontaneous brain activity in resting-state. This thesis seeks to replicate and validate all these results on a new sample, exploring the connection between eye movement dynamics, memory recall of visual stimuli, and intrinsic brain activity and, moreover, to identify distinct patterns in eye movement and hdEEG data for potential clinical applications.