How the eyes respond to sounds

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Ophthalmology
• Auditory Neuroscience

Background:

• Eye movements are primarily studied in response to visual stimuli.
• The influence of other senses, particularly audition, on eye movements is less understood.
• Understanding multisensory interactions is crucial in our complex sensory world.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review existing evidence on how auditory stimuli trigger and influence various eye movements.
• To identify the cortical and subcortical neural mechanisms involved in auditory-driven eye responses.
• To highlight the differences and similarities between auditory and visually driven eye responses.

Main Methods:

• Literature review of studies investigating auditory-evoked eye movements.
• Analysis of research on various sound types (tones, noise, spatialized, linguistic).
• Examination of effects on saccades, microsaccades, smooth pursuit, pupil dilation, and blinks.

Main Results:

• Auditory stimuli modulate different types of eye movements, including saccades and pupil responses.
• Evidence suggests behavioral and neural interactions between the auditory and oculomotor systems.
• Auditory-driven eye responses differ from those elicited by visual stimuli.

Conclusions:

• The auditory system significantly interacts with the oculomotor system, influencing eye movements.
• While multisensory interactions are evident, the precise computational and neural mechanisms require further investigation.
• Many aspects of auditory-evoked eye responses remain underexplored, presenting avenues for future research.