Dodge-Ing the Issue: Dodge, Javal, Hering, and the Measurement of Saccades in Eye-Movement Research

Perception ◽  
10.1068/p3470 ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 32 (7) ◽  
pp. 793-804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas J Wade ◽  
Benjamin W Tatler ◽  
Dieter Heller

Dodge, in 1916, suggested that the French term ‘saccade’ should be used for describing the rapid movements of the eyes that occur while reading. Previously he had referred to these as type I movements. Javal had used the term ‘saccade’ in 1879, when describing experiments conducted in his laboratory by Lamare. Accordingly, Javal has been rightly credited with assigning the term to rapid eye movements. In English these rapid rotations had been called jerks, and they had been observed and measured before Lamare's studies of reading. Rapid sweeps of the eyes occur as one phase of nystagmus; they were observed by Wells in 1792 who used an afterimage technique, and they were illustrated by Crum Brown in 1878. Afterimages were used in nineteenth-century research on eye movements and eye position; they were also employed by Hering in 1879, to ascertain how the eyes moved during reading. In the previous year, Javal had employed afterimages in his investigations of reading, but this was to demonstrate that the eyes moved horizontally rather than vertically. Hering's and Lamare's auditory method established the discontinuous nature of eye movements during reading, and the photographic methods introduced by Dodge and others in the early twentieth century enabled their characteristics to be determined with greater accuracy.

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 297-311
Author(s):  
José David Moreno ◽  
José A. León ◽  
Lorena A. M. Arnal ◽  
Juan Botella

Abstract. We report the results of a meta-analysis of 22 experiments comparing the eye movement data obtained from young ( Mage = 21 years) and old ( Mage = 73 years) readers. The data included six eye movement measures (mean gaze duration, mean fixation duration, total sentence reading time, mean number of fixations, mean number of regressions, and mean length of progressive saccade eye movements). Estimates were obtained of the typified mean difference, d, between the age groups in all six measures. The results showed positive combined effect size estimates in favor of the young adult group (between 0.54 and 3.66 in all measures), although the difference for the mean number of fixations was not significant. Young adults make in a systematic way, shorter gazes, fewer regressions, and shorter saccadic movements during reading than older adults, and they also read faster. The meta-analysis results confirm statistically the most common patterns observed in previous research; therefore, eye movements seem to be a useful tool to measure behavioral changes due to the aging process. Moreover, these results do not allow us to discard either of the two main hypotheses assessed for explaining the observed aging effects, namely neural degenerative problems and the adoption of compensatory strategies.


Author(s):  
Julian Wright

This chapter asks wider questions about the flow of time as it was explored in this historical writing. It focuses on Jaurès’ philosophy of history, initially through a brief discussion of his doctoral thesis and the essay entitled ‘Le bilan social du XIXème siècle’ that he provided at the end of the Histoire socialiste, then through the work of three of his collaborators, Gabriel Deville, Eugène Fournière, and Georges Renard. One of the most important challenges for socialists in the early twentieth century was to understand the damage and division caused by revolution, while not losing the transformative mission of their socialism. With these elements established, the chapter returns to Jaurès, and in particular the long study of nineteenth-century society in chapter 10 of L’Armée nouvelle. Jaurès advanced an original vision of the nineteenth century and its meaning for the socialist present.


1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Caulk

Several centuries after firearms had been introduced, they were still of little importance in Ethiopia, where cavalry continued to dominate warfare until the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, they were much sought after by local leaders ambitious to secure their autonomy or to grasp supreme authority. The first of these warlords to make himself emperor, Tēwodros (1855–68), owed nothing to firearms. However, his successors, Yohannis IV (1872–89) and Minīlik (d. 1913), did. Both excelled in their mastery of the new technology and acquired large quantities of quick-firing weapons. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, possession of firearms — principally the breech loading rifle — had become a precondition for successfully contending for national leadership. Yet the wider revolution associated (as in Egypt) with the establishment of a European-style army did not follow. Nor was rearmament restricted to the following of the emperor. Despite the revival of imperial authority effected by Yohannis and Minīlik, rifles and even machine-guns were widely enough spread at the turn of the century to reinforce the fragmentation of power long characteristic of the Ethiopian state. Into the early twentieth century, it remained uncertain if the peculiar advantages of the capital in the import of arms would be made to serve centralization.


2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-190
Author(s):  
Stefan Knapik

Abstract The pedagogical treatise is generally understood to be a manual of singing or instrumental techniques that is largely practical in approach, yet a critique of violin tutor books dating from the early twentieth century, especially those written by the renowned violinists Joseph Joachim (writing in conjunction with Andreas Moser), Leopold Auer, and Carl Flesch, reveals an extensive engagement with a range of wider ideologies. In a bid to trump the supposedly deadening effects of both a historicism resulting from the availability of earlier treatises, as well as the overly scientific approach taken by contemporaneous treatises, these violinist-authors embrace metaphysical ideals of mind or vitality, and the result is a model of violin playing founded on the concept of “singing tone,” an idea developed out of nineteenth-century notions of song/melody as embodying a vital essence. As did Wagner, in his 1869 essay Über das Dirigiren, writers play with the idea that theoretical and performative categories, such as tempo, phrasing, dynamics, vibrato, and types of bow stroke, both conflict with each other and find a deeper unity in a subjectivist ideal of tone. The approach of these texts is not explorative, however, so much as a rather defensive championing of the idea of mind or vitality: ideologies of self, health, and nationalism ultimately prevail over an engagement with historical evidence in Moser's discussion of ornaments, and Auer's intolerance of any mitigating influence that might qualify the artist's final word on aesthetic matters is reminiscent of a reductive, Nietzschean ideal of vitality. Nevertheless, writers struggle to reconcile it with the messier realities of performing, as an embodied and collaborative activity, and subsequently what speaks louder in their texts are anxieties over affronts to notions of self, expressed using pathological notions common to the era. Whereas at times writers encourage students of the violin to share in their lauding of vitalistic ideals, more often than not they try to impose disciplinary measures as a means of inculcating them.


Author(s):  
David M. Rabban

Most American legal scholars have described their nineteenth-century predecessors as deductive formalists. In my recent book, Law’s History : American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History, I demonstrate instead that the first generation of professional legal scholars in the United States, who wrote during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, viewed law as a historically based inductive science. They constituted a distinctive historical school of American jurisprudence that was superseded by the development of sociological jurisprudence in the early twentieth century. This article focuses on the transatlantic context, involving connections between European and American scholars, in which the historical school of American jurisprudence emerged, flourished, and eventually declined.


1993 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 965-979 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Hepp ◽  
A. J. Van Opstal ◽  
D. Straumann ◽  
B. J. Hess ◽  
V. Henn

1. Although the eye has three rotational degrees of freedom, eye positions, during fixations, saccades, and smooth pursuit, with the head stationary and upright, are constrained to a plane by ListingR's law. We investigated whether Listing's law for rapid eye movements is implemented at the level of the deeper layers of the superior colliculus (SC). 2. In three alert rhesus monkeys we tested whether the saccadic motor map of the SC is two dimensional, representing oculocentric target vectors (the vector or V-model), or three dimensional, representing the coordinates of the rotation of the eye from initial to final position (the quaternion or Q-model). 3. Monkeys made spontaneous saccadic eye movements both in the light and in the dark. They were also rotated about various axes to evoke quick phases of vestibular nystagmus, which have three degrees of freedom. Eye positions were measured in three dimensions with the magnetic search coil technique. 4. While the monkey made spontaneous eye movements, we electrically stimulated the deeper layers of the SC and elicited saccades from a wide range of initial positions. According to the Q-model, the torsional component of eye position after stimulation should be uniquely related to saccade onset position. However, stimulation at 110 sites induced no eye torsion, in line with the prediction of the V-model. 5. Activity of saccade-related burst neurons in the deeper layers of the SC was analyzed during rapid eye movements in three dimensions. No systematic eye-position dependence of the movement fields, as predicted by the Q-model, could be detected for these cells. Instead, the data fitted closely the predictions made by the V-model. 6. In two monkeys, both SC were reversibly inactivated by symmetrical bilateral injections of muscimol. The frequency of spontaneous saccades in the light decreased dramatically. Although the remaining spontaneous saccades were slow, Listing's law was still obeyed, both during fixations and saccadic gaze shifts. In the dark, vestibularly elicited fast phases of nystagmus could still be generated in three dimensions. Although the fastest quick phases of horizontal and vertical nystagmus were slower by about a factor of 1.5, those of torsional quick phases were unaffected. 7. On the basis of the electrical stimulation data and the properties revealed by the movement field analysis, we conclude that the collicular motor map is two dimensional. The reversible inactivation results suggest that the SC is not the site where three-dimensional fast phases of vestibular nystagmus are generated.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)


1999 ◽  
Vol 82 (5) ◽  
pp. 2612-2632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre A. Sylvestre ◽  
Kathleen E. Cullen

The mechanics of the eyeball and its surrounding tissues, which together form the oculomotor plant, have been shown to be the same for smooth pursuit and saccadic eye movements. Hence it was postulated that similar signals would be carried by motoneurons during slow and rapid eye movements. In the present study, we directly addressed this proposal by determining which eye movement–based models best describe the discharge dynamics of primate abducens neurons during a variety of eye movement behaviors. We first characterized abducens neuron spike trains, as has been classically done, during fixation and sinusoidal smooth pursuit. We then systematically analyzed the discharge dynamics of abducens neurons during and following saccades, during step-ramp pursuit and during high velocity slow-phase vestibular nystagmus. We found that the commonly utilized first-order description of abducens neuron firing rates (FR = b + kE + rE˙, where FR is firing rate, E and E˙ are eye position and velocity, respectively, and b, k, and r are constants) provided an adequate model of neuronal activity during saccades, smooth pursuit, and slow phase vestibular nystagmus. However, the use of a second-order model, which included an exponentially decaying term or “slide” (FR = b + kE + rE˙ + uË − c[Formula: see text]), notably improved our ability to describe neuronal activity when the eye was moving and also enabled us to model abducens neuron discharges during the postsaccadic interval. We also found that, for a given model, a single set of parameters could not be used to describe neuronal firing rates during both slow and rapid eye movements. Specifically, the eye velocity and position coefficients ( r and k in the above models, respectively) consistently decreased as a function of the mean (and peak) eye velocity that was generated. In contrast, the bias ( b, firing rate when looking straight ahead) invariably increased with eye velocity. Although these trends are likely to reflect, in part, nonlinearities that are intrinsic to the extraocular muscles, we propose that these results can also be explained by considering the time-varying resistance to movement that is generated by the antagonist muscle. We conclude that to create realistic and meaningful models of the neural control of horizontal eye movements, it is essential to consider the activation of the antagonist, as well as agonist motoneuron pools.


Author(s):  
Paul Franks

This article examines three moments of the post-Kantian philosophical tradition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Kantianism, Post-Kantian Idealism, and Neo-Kantianism. It elucidates the distinctive methods of a tradition that has never entirely disappeared and is now acknowledged once again as the source of contemporary insights. It outlines two problematics—naturalist scepticism and historicist nihilism—threatening the possibility of metaphysics. The first concerns sceptical worries about reason, emerging from attempts to extend the methods of natural science to the study of human beings. Kant’s project of a critical and transcendental analysis of reason, with its distinctive methods, should be considered a response. The second arises from the development of new methods of historical inquiry, seeming to undermine the very possibility of individual agency. Also considered are Kant’s successors’ revisions of the critical and transcendental analysis of reason, undertaken to overcome challenges confronting the original versions of Kant’s methods.


1992 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 319-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. L. McFarland ◽  
A. F. Fuchs

1. Monkeys were trained to perform a variety of horizontal eye tracking tasks designed to reveal possible eye movement and vestibular sensitivities of neurons in the medulla. To test eye movement sensitivity, we required stationary monkeys to track a small spot that moved horizontally. To test vestibular sensitivity, we rotated the monkeys about a vertical axis and required them to fixate a target rotating with them to suppress the vestibuloocular reflex (VOR). 2. All of the 100 units described in our study were recorded from regions of the medulla that were prominently labeled after injections of horseradish peroxidase into the abducens nucleus. These regions include the nucleus prepositus hypoglossi (NPH), the medial vestibular nucleus (MVN), and their common border (the “marginal zone”). We report here the activities of three different types of neurons recorded in these regions. 3. Two types responded only during eye movements per se. Their firing rates increased with eye position; 86% had ipsilateral “on” directions. Almost three quarters (73%) of these medullary neurons exhibited a burst-tonic discharge pattern that is qualitatively similar to that of abducens motoneurons. There were, however, quantitative differences in that these medullary burst-position neurons were less sensitive to eye position than were abducens motoneurons and often did not pause completely for saccades in the off direction. The burst of medullary burst position neurons preceded the saccade by an average of 7.6 +/- 1.7 (SD) ms and, on average, lasted the duration of the saccade. The number of spikes in the burst was well correlated with saccade size. The second type of eye movement neuron displayed either no discernible burst or an inconsistent one for on-direction saccades and will be referred to as medullary position neurons. Neither the burst-position nor the position neurons responded when the animals suppressed the VOR; hence, they displayed no vestibular sensitivity. 4. The third type of neuron was sensitive to both eye movement and vestibular stimulation. These neurons increased their firing rates during horizontal head rotation and smooth pursuit eye movements in the same direction; most (76%) preferred ipsilateral head and eye movements. Their firing rates were approximately in phase with eye velocity during sinusoidal smooth pursuit and with head velocity during VOR suppression; on average, their eye velocity sensitivity was 50% greater than their vestibular sensitivity. Sixty percent of these eye/head velocity cells were also sensitive to eye position. 5. The NPH/MVN region contains many neurons that could provide an eye position signal to abducens neurons.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)


2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-15
Author(s):  
William Gibbons

In December 1907, Gluck's opera Iphigénie en Aulide was produced in Paris at the Opéra-Comique, the last of his major operas to be revived in France. The ensuing critical reception pitted Vincent d'Indy, who harshly criticized the production, against its director, Albert Carré; d'Indy further responded by conducting the overture to Iphigénie only a few weeks later as a musical corrective to the performance at the Opéra-Comique. This unusual event highlights the historiographie problem Gluck presented to early twentieth-century critics in France: did his music look backwards to the tragédies lyriques of Lully and Rameau, or did it prefigure the Wagnerian music-dramas of the nineteenth century? The 1907 Opéra-Comique production of Iphigénie and its aftermath encapsulate the struggle to incorporate Gluck into newly developing and often competing narratives of music history.


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