Abstract:

Although the fact that the eye is moving constantly has been known for a long time, the role of fixational eye movements (FEM) is still in dispute. Whatever their role, it is structurally clear that, since the eye is a ball, the size of these movements diminishes for locations closer to the poles. Here we propose a new perspective on the role of FEM from which we derive a prediction for a three-way interaction of a stimulus' orientation, location, and spatial frequency. Measuring time-to-disappearance for gratings located in the periphery we find that, as predicted, gratings located to the left and right of fixation fade faster when horizontal than when vertical in low spatial frequencies and faster when vertical than when horizontal in high spatial frequencies. The opposite is true for gratings located above and below fixation.

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