Volume 8, Number 14, Article 13, Pages 1-17 doi:10.1167/8.14.13 http://journalofvision.org/8/14/13/ ISSN 1534-7362
Fixational eye movements predict the perceived direction of ambiguous apparent motion
Jochen Laubrock
Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
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Ralf Engbert
Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
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Reinhold Kliegl
Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany
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Abstract

Neuronal activity in area LIP is correlated with the perceived direction of ambiguous apparent motion (Z. M. Williams, J. C. Elfar, E. N. Eskandar, L. J. Toth, & J. A. Assad, 2003). Here we show that a similar correlation exists for small eye movements made during fixation. A moving dot grid with superimposed fixation point was presented through an aperture. In a motion discrimination task, unambiguous motion was compared with ambiguous motion obtained by shifting the grid by half of the dot distance. In three experiments we show that (a) microsaccadic inhibition, i.e., a drop in microsaccade frequency precedes reports of perceptual flips, (b) microsaccadic inhibition does not accompany simple response changes, and (c) the direction of microsaccades occurring before motion onset biases the subsequent perception of ambiguous motion. We conclude that microsaccades provide a signal on which perceptual judgments rely in the absence of objective disambiguating stimulus information.

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History
Received December 19, 2007; published October 23, 2008
Citation
Laubrock, J., Engbert, R., & Kliegl, R. (2008). Fixational eye movements predict the perceived direction of ambiguous apparent motion. Journal of Vision, 8(14):13, 1-17, http://journalofvision.org/8/14/13/, doi:10.1167/8.14.13.
Keywords
eye movements, awareness, attention, fixation, apparent motion, bistable perception, ambiguous figures, flicker, stroboscopic motion, optokinetic nystagmus
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