"Microsaccades" Help To Refresh Your Field of View

Ponca City, We love you writes with news of research from the Salk Institute into small, unconscious eye movements called "microsaccades," the purpose of which has been in question for many years. A recent study showed that those movements were essentially responsible for maintaining a coherent image for interpretation by the brain. They are also the cause of a famous optical illusion in which a still image appears to move. '"Because images on the retina fade from view if they are perfectly stabilized, the active generation of fixational eye movements by the central nervous system allows these movements to constantly shift the scene ever so slightly, thus refreshing the images on our retina and preventing us from going 'blind,'" explains Hafed. "When images begin to fade, the uncertainty about where to look increases the fluctuations in superior colliculus activity, triggering a microsaccade," adds Krauzlis.'"

Re:how is this new?

[causality]

Early experiments were performed using a grain-of-wheat bulb literally glued to the eyeball.

Am I the only one who shuddered a bit when I read this and thought about how it would feel to have a small object glued to the eyeball? I'm sure it was benign and performed by competent people who knew what they were doing ... but damn, that just sounds like a form of torture.

Re:how is this new?

[ColdWetDog]

It sounds like what these guys are doing is relating these involuntary eye movements to brain activity. That's interesting if not particularly novel: some of the people I worked for were doing this twenty-five years ago using EEGs.

Yes, however this research points to a particular part of the brain, the superior colliculus. That's interesting in a mapping sense. Perhaps not earth shattering, mind boggling interesting like a picture of the FSM, but interesting. Perhaps with better techniques, somebody will be able to tease the movements apart a bit better. As you alluded to in your post, sacchades are interesting from a clinical point of view. How about being able to manipulate microsacchades on a monitor and insert (evil-commercial-concept-or-product)? Your garden variety tinfoil goggles would be useless!

What's more interesting to me is that we're generally completely unaware of these eye movements, just as we're generally unaware of our blind spots. It's an impressive bit of (ahem) abstraction layering that the brain does for us.

Well and again, yes. Do you want to have to will your heart to beat faster when you go up a flight of stairs? What happens if you forget that detail. The automaticity of our bodies allows us to concentrate on important things.

Like Slashdot.

Re:The illusions don't work for me

[causality]

As an undergrad I had to sit through tests involving optical illusions for the psychology students, and in my case lots of the illusions didn't work. That got me excused from further tests, because they didn't want to make their precious stats go funny by including cases like mine (and about three other people in the class I recall).

That sounds like they are not very concerned about the accuracy of their stats. You mentioned that this was a type of test. What's the point of running a test if you have pre-determined the outcome? That is more properly called (by them, not you) a demonstration.

While the optical illusion tests you describe are probably not terribly important in the scheme of things, I mention this because it's surprising how many important things are handled this way. It's to the point that whenever I see a purportedly scientific study, my first question is "who funded it?"

Re:Ok, so...

[PPH]

Slashdotters' field of view is 1280x1024pixels. Anything outside of that is extraneous noise.