Effect of source intensity on ability to fixate: implications for laser safety

During long-term viewing of a continuous light source, head and eye movements affect the distribution of energy deposited in the retina. Previous studies of eye movements during a fixation task provided data used for revising the safety limits for long-term viewing of such sources. These studies have been continued to determine the effect of source brightness on the nature of fixational eye movements. Volunteers fixated for 50 s on a HeNe laser (lambda = 632.8 nm) masked by a small aperture to produce a target subtending approximately 0.03 mrad in the visual field. The source was attenuated to yield corneal irradiance values in the range 0.6 pW cm(-2) to 6 microW cm(-2). Eye movements were recorded using a Dual Purkinje Image Eyetracker. The data were characterized by fixation ellipses that represent areas of the retina in which the image of the spot was located 68% of the time of each trial. Significant variation across subjects in the tightness of fixation was observed. Over the eight orders of magnitude of source brightness used in this experiment (10(-13) to 10(-6) W cm(-2)), no subject showed more than roughly a factor of two variation in the area of the fixation ellipse. No statistically significant trend in tightness of fixation as a function of source brightness was observed. There was no loss of ability to fixate, nor any drive to aversion, at the higher source intensities.