scholarly journals Directing voluntary temporal attention increases fixational stability

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel N. Denison ◽  
Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg ◽  
Marisa Carrasco
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Visual Perception ◽  
Task Performance ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Perceptual Sensitivity ◽  
Temporal Attention ◽  
Relevant Stimulus ◽  
Gaze Stabilization ◽  
Cortical Areas ◽  
Fixational Eye Movements

AbstractOur visual input is constantly changing, but not all moments are equally relevant. Temporal attention, the prioritization of visual information at specific points in time, increases perceptual sensitivity at behaviorally relevant times. The dynamic processes underlying this increase are unclear. During fixation, humans make small eye movements called microsaccades, and inhibiting microsaccades improves perception of brief stimuli. Here we asked whether temporal attention changes the pattern of microsaccades in anticipation of brief stimuli. Human observers (female and male) judged brief stimuli presented within a short sequence. They were given either an informative precue to attend to one of the stimuli, which was likely to be probed, or an uninformative (neutral) precue. We found strong microsaccadic inhibition before the stimulus sequence, likely due to its predictable onset. Critically, this anticipatory inhibition was stronger when the first target in the sequence (T1) was precued (task-relevant) than when the precue was uninformative. Moreover, the timing of the last microsaccade before T1 and the first microsaccade after T1 shifted, such that both occurred earlier when T1 was precued than when the precue was uninformative. Finally, the timing of the nearest pre- and post-T1 microsaccades affected task performance. Directing voluntary temporal attention therefore impacts microsaccades, helping to stabilize fixation at the most relevant moments, over and above the effect of predictability. Just as saccading to a relevant stimulus can be an overt correlate of the allocation of spatial attention, precisely timed gaze stabilization can be an overt correlate of the allocation of temporal attention.Significance statementWe pay attention at moments in time when a relevant event is likely to occur. Such temporal attention improves our visual perception, but how it does so is not well understood. Here we discovered a new behavioral correlate of voluntary, or goal-directed, temporal attention. We found that the pattern of small fixational eye movements called microsaccades changes around behaviorally relevant moments in a way that stabilizes the position of the eyes. Microsaccades during a brief visual stimulus can impair perception of that stimulus. Therefore, such fixation stabilization may contribute to the improvement of visual perception at attended times. This link suggests that in addition to cortical areas, subcortical areas mediating eye movements may be recruited with temporal attention.

Baseball Players’ Eye Movements and Higher Coincident-Timing Task Performance

2020 ◽  
Vol 127 (3) ◽  
pp. 571-586
Author(s):  
Ikumi Tochikura ◽  
Daisuke Sato ◽  
Daiki Imoto ◽  
Atsuo Nuruki ◽  
Koya Yamashiro ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Information Processing ◽  
Eye Movements ◽  
Task Performance ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Absolute Error ◽  
Visual Information Processing ◽  
Baseball Players ◽  
Mobile Targets ◽  
Timing Task

Previous studies have reported that baseball players have higher than average visual information processing abilities and outstanding motor control. The speed and position of the baseball and the batter are constantly changing, leading skilled players to acquire highly accurate visual information processing and decision-making. This study sought to clarify how movement of the eyes is associated with baseball players’ higher coincident-timing task performance. We recruited 15 right-handed baseball players and 15 age-matched track and field athletes. On a computer-based coincident-timing task, we instructed participants to stop a computer image of a moving target by pressing a button at a designated point. We presented bidirectional moving targets with various velocities, presented in a random order. The targets’ moving angular velocity varied between 100, 83, 71, 63, 56, 50, and 46 deg/s. We conducted 168 repetitions (42 reps × 4 sets) of this coincident-timing task and measured participants’ eye movements during the task using Pupil Centre Corneal Reflection. Mixed-design analysis of variance results revealed participant group effects in favor of baseball players for timing absolute error and low absolute error, as predicted from prior visual processing and decision-making research with baseball players. However, in contrast to prior research, we found significantly shorter smooth-pursuit onset latency in elite baseball players, and there were no significant group differences for saccade onset and offset latencies. This may be explained by the difference in our research paradigm with mobile targets randomly presented at various velocities from the left and right. Our data showed baseball players’ higher than normal simultaneous timing execution for making decisions and movements based on visual information, even under laboratory conditions with randomly moving mobile targets.

Role of Eye Movements in the Retinal Code for a Size Discrimination Task

2007 ◽  
Vol 98 (3) ◽  
pp. 1380-1391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronen Segev ◽  
Elad Schneidman ◽  
Joe Goodhouse ◽  
Michael J. Berry
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Ganglion Cells ◽  
Multielectrode Array ◽  
Retinal Ganglion ◽  
Size Discrimination ◽  
Fixational Eye Movements ◽  
Stationary Objects ◽  
A Minor

The concerted action of saccades and fixational eye movements are crucial for seeing stationary objects in the visual world. We studied how these eye movements contribute to retinal coding of visual information using the archer fish as a model system. We quantified the animal's ability to distinguish among objects of different sizes and measured its eye movements. We recorded from populations of retinal ganglion cells with a multielectrode array, while presenting visual stimuli matched to the behavioral task. We found that the beginning of fixation, namely the time immediately after the saccade, provided the most visual information about object size, with fixational eye movements, which consist of tremor and drift in the archer fish, yielding only a minor contribution. A simple decoder that combined information from ≤15 ganglion cells could account for the behavior. Our results support the view that saccades impose not just difficulties for the visual system, but also an opportunity for the retina to encode high quality “snapshots” of the environment.

scholarly journals Fixational Eye Movements: Data Augmentation for the Brain?

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beren Millidge
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Visual Perception ◽  
Data Augmentation ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Neural Data ◽  
Fixational Eye Movements ◽  
Processing Theory ◽  
Invariant Representations ◽  
Neural Underpinnings ◽  
The Brain

Fixational eye movements are ubiquitous and have a large impact on visual perception. Although their physical characteristics and, to some extent, neural underpinnings are well documented, their function, with the exception of preventing visual fading, remains poorly understood. In this paper, we propose that the visual system might utilize the relatively large number of similar slightly jittered images produced by fixational eye movements to help learn robust and spatially invariant representations as a form of neural data augmentation. Additionally, we form a link between effects such as retinal stabilization and predictive processing theory, and argue that they may be best explained under such a paradigm.

scholarly journals Visual Perception from Object Scanning as Revealed by Electrooculography

Ophthalmology ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 98-114
Author(s):  
Anwesha Banerjee ◽  
Ankita Mazumder ◽  
Poulami Ghosh ◽  
D. N. Tibarewala
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Visual Perception ◽  
Field Of View ◽  
Visual Environment ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Fixational Eye Movements ◽  
Visual Processes ◽  
Points Of Interest ◽  
Do So

We the human beings are blessed by the nature to become well competent for performing highly precise and copious visual processes with how ever a restricted field of view. Howbeit, this process of visual perception is, to a great extent, controlled by the saccades or more commonly the eye movements. The positioning and accommodation of eyes allows an image to be placed (or fixed) in the fovea centralis of the eyes but although we do so to fix our gaze at a particular object, our eyes continuously move. Even though these fixational eye movements includes magnitude that should make them visible to us yet we remain oblivious to them. Microsacades, drifts and tremors that occurs frequently during fixational eye movements, contribute largely to the visual perception. We use saccades several times per second to move the fovea between points of interest and build an understanding of our visual environment.

scholarly journals Eyes on Emotion: Dynamic Gaze Allocation During Emotion Perception From Speech-Like Stimuli

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-47
Author(s):  
Minke J. de Boer ◽  
Deniz Başkent ◽  
Frans W. Cornelissen
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Task Performance ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Emotion Perception ◽  
Present Knowledge ◽  
Emotional Expressions ◽  
Dynamic Nature ◽  
Identification Task ◽  
Emotion Identification ◽  
Available Information

Abstract The majority of emotional expressions used in daily communication are multimodal and dynamic in nature. Consequently, one would expect that human observers utilize specific perceptual strategies to process emotions and to handle the multimodal and dynamic nature of emotions. However, our present knowledge on these strategies is scarce, primarily because most studies on emotion perception have not fully covered this variation, and instead used static and/or unimodal stimuli with few emotion categories. To resolve this knowledge gap, the present study examined how dynamic emotional auditory and visual information is integrated into a unified percept. Since there is a broad spectrum of possible forms of integration, both eye movements and accuracy of emotion identification were evaluated while observers performed an emotion identification task in one of three conditions: audio-only, visual-only video, or audiovisual video. In terms of adaptations of perceptual strategies, eye movement results showed a shift in fixations toward the eyes and away from the nose and mouth when audio is added. Notably, in terms of task performance, audio-only performance was mostly significantly worse than video-only and audiovisual performances, but performance in the latter two conditions was often not different. These results suggest that individuals flexibly and momentarily adapt their perceptual strategies to changes in the available information for emotion recognition, and these changes can be comprehensively quantified with eye tracking.

scholarly journals Contributions of fixational eye movements to the early encoding of visual information

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 1123-1123
Author(s):  
M. Rucci ◽  
M. Poletti ◽  
J. Victor ◽  
X. Kuang
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Fixational Eye Movements

scholarly journals Decorrelation of retinal response to natural scenes by fixational eye movements

2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (10) ◽  
pp. 3110-3115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irina Yonit Segal ◽  
Chen Giladi ◽  
Michael Gedalin ◽  
Michele Rucci ◽  
Mor Ben-Tov ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Retinal Ganglion Cells ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Ganglion Cells ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Natural Scenes ◽  
Retinal Ganglion ◽  
Spatial Correlations ◽  
Fixational Eye Movements ◽  
Spatiotemporal Signal

Under natural viewing conditions the input to the retina is a complex spatiotemporal signal that depends on both the scene and the way the observer moves. It is commonly assumed that the retina processes this input signal efficiently by taking into account the statistics of the natural world. It has recently been argued that incessant microscopic eye movements contribute to this process by decorrelating the input to the retina. Here we tested this theory by measuring the responses of the salamander retina to stimuli replicating the natural input signals experienced by the retina in the presence and absence of fixational eye movements. Contrary to the predictions of classic theories of efficient encoding that do not take behavior into account, we show that the response characteristics of retinal ganglion cells are not sufficient in themselves to disrupt the broad correlations of natural scenes. Specifically, retinal ganglion cells exhibited strong and extensive spatial correlations in the absence of fixational eye movements. However, the levels of correlation in the neural responses dropped in the presence of fixational eye movements, resulting in effective decorrelation of the channels streaming information to the brain. These observations confirm the predictions that microscopic eye movements act to reduce correlations in retinal responses and contribute to visual information processing.

Visual Perception from Object Scanning as Revealed by Electrooculography

2016 ◽  
pp. 147-163
Author(s):  
Anwesha Banerjee ◽  
Ankita Mazumder ◽  
Poulami Ghosh ◽  
D. N. Tibarewala
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Visual Perception ◽  
Field Of View ◽  
Visual Environment ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Fixational Eye Movements ◽  
Visual Processes ◽  
Points Of Interest ◽  
Do So

We the human beings are blessed by the nature to become well competent for performing highly precise and copious visual processes with how ever a restricted field of view. Howbeit, this process of visual perception is, to a great extent, controlled by the saccades or more commonly the eye movements. The positioning and accommodation of eyes allows an image to be placed (or fixed) in the fovea centralis of the eyes but although we do so to fix our gaze at a particular object, our eyes continuously move. Even though these fixational eye movements includes magnitude that should make them visible to us yet we remain oblivious to them. Microsacades, drifts and tremors that occurs frequently during fixational eye movements, contribute largely to the visual perception. We use saccades several times per second to move the fovea between points of interest and build an understanding of our visual environment.

The role of fixational eye movements in visual perception

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susana Martinez-Conde ◽  
Stephen L. Macknik ◽  
David H. Hubel
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Visual Perception ◽  
Fixational Eye Movements

Situational Factors Competing for Attention

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Weiyu Zhang ◽  
Se-Hoon Jeong ◽  
Martin Fishbein†
Keyword(s):  
Task Performance ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Situational Factors ◽  
Sexual Content ◽  
Sexually Explicit ◽  
Explicit Content ◽  
Audio Information

This study investigates how multitasking interacts with levels of sexually explicit content to influence an individual’s ability to recognize TV content. A 2 (multitasking vs. nonmultitasking) by 3 (low, medium, and high sexual content) between-subjects experiment was conducted. The analyses revealed that multitasking not only impaired task performance, but also decreased TV recognition. An inverted-U relationship between degree of sexually explicit content and recognition of TV content was found, but only when subjects were multitasking. In addition, multitasking interfered with subjects’ ability to recognize audio information more than their ability to recognize visual information.

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