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Eye movements between saccades: Measuring ocular drift and tremor
Hee-Kyoung Ko1, D Max Snodderly1, Martina Poletti2
1Department of Neuroscience, Institute for Neuroscience, and Center for Perceptual Systems, University of Texas at Austin, United States.
Vision Research
|April 13, 2016
Summary
Small eye movements during fixation, often ignored, significantly impact vision. High-precision eyetrackers can measure this ocular activity, revealing similar patterns in humans and primates.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Ophthalmology
- Biomedical Engineering
Background:
- Intersaccadic fixation involves continuous retinal motion from small eye movements.
- These movements are typically dismissed as noise but introduce significant temporal modulations.
- Analyzing these modulations is difficult due to the limitations of current eyetracking technology.
Purpose of the Study:
- To analyze the resolution limits of high-precision eyetrackers for measuring intersaccadic eye motion.
- To compare intersaccadic eye movements between humans and non-human primates.
- To establish guidelines for optimizing eyetracker performance in measuring ocular drift and tremor.
Main Methods:
- In-depth analysis of the Dual-Purkinje Image and scleral search coil eyetracking systems.
- Utilized a model eye to determine the resolution capabilities of the eyetrackers.
- Comparative analysis of human and non-human primate intersaccadic eye movements.
Main Results:
- Both high-precision eyetrackers can reliably measure intersaccadic ocular activity up to approximately 80Hz.
- Ocular drift characteristics are highly similar between humans and non-human primates.
- A deviation from scale-invariant spectrum (ocular tremor) occurs between 50-100Hz, causing retinal speeds up to 1.5deg/s, with differing amplitudes on motion axes.
Conclusions:
- High-precision eyetrackers are capable of measuring subtle intersaccadic eye movements.
- Ocular drift and tremor exhibit conserved characteristics across species.
- Recommendations are provided for evaluating eyetracker performance and experimental setup for ocular drift studies.
