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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Mar 31, 2026

Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity

Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity

Published on: March 18, 2019

Fixational eye movements predict visual sensitivity.

Chris Scholes¹, Paul V McGraw², Marcus Nyström³

¹Visual Neuroscience Group, School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK chris.scholes@nottingham.ac.uk.

Proceedings. Biological Sciences

|October 16, 2015

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Fixational saccades, small eye movements during fixation, show sensitivity to visual stimulus contrast. This eye movement signature can objectively estimate contrast sensitivity, matching human perception.

Keywords:

contrast sensitivity fixational saccades machine learning microsaccades

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Vision Science
Ophthalmology

Background:

During steady visual fixation, observers exhibit small fixational saccades at a rate of 1-2 Hz.
Visual stimulus presentation elicits a biphasic modulation in fixational saccade rate: initial inhibition, followed by an elevated rate, and a return to baseline.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the sensitivity of fixational saccade rate modulation to changes in visual stimulus contrast.
To compare the contrast sensitivity of fixational eye movements with psychophysical judgments using machine learning.

Main Methods:

A linear support vector machine (SVM) was trained to classify trials with and without visual stimuli.
Fixational saccade rates were analyzed during passive viewing under varying stimulus contrasts.
Classification accuracy was directly compared with psychophysical contrast sensitivity measurements.

Main Results:

The fixational saccade rate signature demonstrated high sensitivity to small variations in stimulus contrast.
SVM classification accuracy closely mirrored psychophysical performance.
The classifier accurately predicted individual contrast sensitivity thresholds with reduced bias and error compared to traditional methods.

Conclusions:

Fixational saccade dynamics are tightly coupled with visual perceptual sensitivity.
Fixational saccades offer a potential novel, objective method for assessing visual contrast sensitivity without explicit observer judgments.
This approach may provide a more efficient and less biased measure of visual function.