The joint contributions of saccades and ocular drift to repeated ocular fixations

We measured the joint contributions of different sized saccades and ocular drift to overall performance in an alternating fixation task. Subjects repeatedly shifted fixation between the centres of a pair of bars of width 2 degrees -2 arc min, either mentally selected or electronically cut from a stationary sine grating display. Eye movement patterns exhibited consistent features across all displays, and pairs of widely separated bars were studied most. Variability (S.D.) and relative accuracy (under/overshooting bias) were estimated from the concentration of eye positions over the two target bars. Overall variability, i.e. for eye movements as a whole, reached a minimum of 5 min for bar widths less than 20 min across subjects, displays and tasks. This was consistent, as were several other aspects of the study, with a constant 20-min diameter goal zone hypothesis. For wide bars, overall variability increased nearly as the square root of bar width, and for narrow bars, was independent of bar separation. A typical between-bar crossing saccade was tightly constrained in departure point but widely scattered in landing position, the associated variability increasing with bar separation. The final high overall precision was achieved largely by within-bar saccades of greater than 7.5 min effective amplitude that were present at a rate of 1 (range 0.3-3) per crossing saccade. This is consistent with views that very small saccades (the smaller microsaccades) make little obvious contribution to oculomotor performance.