A Visual Mechanism for Extraction of Heading Information in Complex Flow Fields

Relationship between eye acceleration and retinal image velocity during foveal smooth pursuit in man and monkey.

Long-term adaptive changes in primate vestibuloocular reflex. III. Electrophysiological observations in flocculus of normal monkeys.

Twenty-four subjects were selected for the study. The activity of trunk and lower limb muscles (tibialis anterior, lateral gastrocnemius, medial gastrocnemius, vastus midialis obliques, vastus lateralis, biceps femoris, rectus abdominis, and erector spinae) and the COP (center of pressure) (surface area ellipse, length, and average speed) were measured to observe the effects of gaze fixation and different kinds of smooth-pursuit eye movements on the center of pressure and muscle activities during one leg standing. Before the experiment, a Gaze point GP3 HD Eye Tracker (Gazept, Vancouver, BC, Canada) was used to train eye movement so that the subjects would be familiar with smooth eye movement. Repeated each exercise 3 times at random. In order to avoid the sequence deviation caused by fatigue, the movement sequence is randomly selected. The center of pressure and muscle activities were increased significantly when the smooth-pursuit eye movement with one leg standing compared with gaze fixation with one leg standing. In smooth-pursuit eye movements, the changes in the center of pressure and muscle activities were increased significantly with eye and head movement. When the head and eyes moved in opposite directions, the center of pressure and muscle activities were increased more than with any other exercises. Smooth-pursuit eye movement with one leg movement affects balance. In particular, in the smooth-pursuit eye movement with one leg standing, there were higher requirements for balance when the eyes and head move in the opposite direction. Therefore, this movement can be recommended to people who need to enhance their balance ability.

THINGS-data reflects three large-scale neuroimaging and behavioral datasets of object processing in humans, comprising densely sampled functional MRI and magnetoencephalographic recordings, as well as 4.70 million similarity judgments in response to thousands of photographic images for up to 1854 objects.

1. Purkinje cell activity was recorded from lobules VI and VII of the cerebellar vermis during the performance of visuooculomotor tasks designed to dissociate the signals related to head, smooth-pursuit eye, and retinal image movements. Task-related modulations in the simple spike discharge rates of 157 cells were observed in three alert monkeys. 2. Of 65 Purkinje cells that were completely tested for all three signals, all exhibited smooth-pursuit eye movement-related activity. An additional vestibular or visual response was observed in 17 and 11% of the cells, respectively. Eye, head, and retinal image velocity signals were all recorded in the same unit in 52% of the Purkinje cells. The responses of 5% of the fully tested cells were associated with changes in the direction of eye, head, and retinal image movement. 3. The observed sensorioculomotor responses were direction selective in 98% of the Purkinje cells. For the Purkinje cells that were fully tested, 60% of the cells exhibited peak discharge rates for ipsilateral and 40% for contralateral eye velocity. Of these Purkinje cells, 45% exhibited eye, head, and retinal image velocity signals with equivalent direction preferences. 4. Of 42 Purkinje cells tested, 88% demonstrated some kinds of interactive responses during combined eye and sensory stimulation. The interaction of eye and head velocity signals has been discussed in a companion paper (38). The modulation in discharge rate observed during tracking in the presence of a random dot background pattern could be predicted from the dissociated responses to smooth pursuit in the dark and to movements of the background pattern during suppression of eye movements. 5. The sensitivity to smooth-pursuit eye velocity averaged 1.4 times the sensitivity to head velocity. In 80% of the Purkinje cells, however, the sensitivity to eye velocity exceeded the sensitivity to head velocity by an average of only 10%. The sensitivity to smooth-pursuit eye velocity averaged 1.6 times the sensitivity to retinal image velocity. 6. An increase in Purkinje cell discharge rate was observed during the open-loop period of the initiation of smooth-pursuit eye movements. This open-loop response was consistent with the presence of a visual signal during ocular pursuit, since these cells were also shown to be responsive to a dissociated retinal image velocity signal. Furthermore, the magnitude of the open-loop response indicated an enhancement of the sensitivity to retinal image velocity when visual information became behaviorally significant.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

The relationships between eye and head movements during the viewing of various visual stimuli using a head mounted display (HMD) and a large flat display were compared. The visual sizes of the images displayed were adjusted virtually, using an image processing technique. The negative correlations between head and eye movements in a horizontal direction were significant for some visual stimuli using an HMD and after some practice viewing images. Also, scores of two factors for subjective assessment of viewing stimuli positively correlated with horizontal head movements when certain visual stimuli were used. The result suggests that under certain conditions the viewing of tasks promotes head movements and stimulates correlational relationships between eye and head movements.

The role of compensatory eye and head movements for gaze stabilization in the unrestrained frog

Recently we showed that sensitivity for chromatic- and high-spatial frequency luminance stimuli is enhanced during smooth-pursuit eye movements (SPEMs). Here we investigated whether this enhancement is a general property of slow eye movements. Besides SPEM there are two other classes of eye movements that operate in a similar range of eye velocities: the optokinetic nystagmus (OKN) is a reflexive pattern of alternating fast and slow eye movements elicited by wide-field visual motion and the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) stabilizes the gaze during head movements. In a natural environment all three classes of eye movements act synergistically to allow clear central vision during self- and object motion. To test whether the same improvement of chromatic sensitivity occurs during all of these eye movements, we measured human detection performance of chromatic and luminance line stimuli during OKN and contrast sensitivity during VOR and SPEM at comparable velocities. For comparison, performance in the same tasks was tested during fixation. During the slow phase of OKN we found a similar enhancement of chromatic detection rate like that during SPEM, whereas no enhancement was observable during VOR. This result indicates similarities between slow-phase OKN and SPEM, which are distinct from VOR.

PurposeTo investigate oculomotor behavior in response to dynamic stimuli in retinal implant recipients.MethodsThree suprachoroidal retinal implant recipients performed a four-alternative forced-choice motion discrimination task over six sessions longitudinally. Stimuli were a single white bar (“moving bar”) or a series of white bars (“moving grating”) sweeping left, right, up, or down across a 42″ monitor. Performance was compared with normal video processing and scrambled video processing (randomized image-to-electrode mapping to disrupt spatiotemporal structure). Eye and head movement was monitored throughout the task.ResultsTwo subjects had diminished performance with scrambling, suggesting retinotopic discrimination was used in the normal condition and made smooth pursuit eye movements congruent to the moving bar stimulus direction. These two subjects also made stimulus-related eye movements resembling optokinetic reflex (OKR) for moving grating stimuli, but the movement was incongruent with stimulus direction. The third subject was less adept at the task, appeared primarily reliant on head position cues (head movements were congruent to stimulus direction), and did not exhibit retinotopic discrimination and associated eye movements.ConclusionsOur observation of smooth pursuit indicates residual functionality of cortical direction-selective circuits and implies a more naturalistic perception of motion than expected. A distorted OKR implies improper functionality of retinal direction-selective circuits, possibly due to retinal remodeling or the non-selective nature of the electrical stimulation.Translational RelevanceRetinal implant users can make naturalistic eye movements in response to moving stimuli, highlighting the potential for eye tracker feedback to improve perceptual localization and image stabilization in camera-based visual prostheses.

Growing evidence suggests that orienting visual attention in space can influence the processing of numerical magnitude, with leftward orienting speeding up the processing of small numbers relative to larger ones and the converse for rightward orienting. The manipulation of eye movements is a convenient way to direct visuospatial attention, but several aspects of the complex relationship between eye movements, attention orienting and number processing remain unexplored. In a previous study, we observed that inducing involuntary, reflexive eye movements by means of optokinetic stimulation affected number processing only when numerical magnitude was task relevant (i.e., during magnitude comparison, but not during parity judgment; Ranzini et al., in J Cogn Psychol 27, 459-470, (2015). Here, we investigated whether processing of task-irrelevant numerical magnitude can be modulated by voluntary eye movements, and whether the type of eye movements (smooth pursuit vs. saccades) would influence this interaction. Participants tracked with their gaze a dot while listening to a digit. The numerical task was to indicate whether the digit was odd or even through non-spatial, verbal responses. The dot could move leftward or rightward either continuously, allowing tracking by smooth pursuit eye movements, or in discrete steps across a series of adjacent locations, triggering a sequence of saccades. Both smooth pursuit and saccadic eye movements similarly affected number processing and modulated response times for large numbers as a function of direction of motion. These findings suggest that voluntary eye movements redirect attention in mental number space and highlight that eye movements should play a key factor in the investigation of number-space interactions.

The ocular motor system consists of several subsystems, including the vestibular ocular nystagmus saccade system, the pursuit system, the fixation and gaze-holding system and the vergence system. All these subsystems aid the stabilization of the images on the retina during eye and head movements and any kind of disturbance of one of the systems can cause instability of the eyes (e.g. nystagmus) or an inadequate eye movement causing a mismatch between head and eye movement (e.g. bilateral vestibular failure). In both situations, the subjects experience a movement of the world (oscillopsia) which is quite disturbing. New insights into the patho-physiology of some of the ocular motor disorders have helped to establish new treatment options, in particular in downbeat nystagmus, upbeat nystagmus, periodic alternating nystagmus, acquired pendular nystagmus and paroxysmal vestibular episodes/attacks. The discussed patho-physiology of these disorders and the current literature on treatment options are discussed and practical treatment recommendations are given in the paper.

To localize a seen object, the CNS has to integrate the object's retinal location with the direction of gaze. Here we investigate this process by examining the localization of static objects during smooth pursuit eye movements. The normally experienced stability of the visual world during smooth pursuit suggests that the CNS essentially compensates for the eye movement when judging target locations. However, certain systematic localization errors are made, and we use these to study the process of sensorimotor integration. During an eye movement, a static object's image moves across the retina. Objects that produce retinal slip are known to be mislocalized: objects moving toward the fovea are seen too far on in their trajectory, whereas errors are much smaller for objects moving away from the fovea. These effects are usually studied by localizing the moving object relative to a briefly flashed one during fixation: moving objects are then mislocalized, but flashes are not. In our first experiment, we found that a similar differential mislocalization occurs for static objects relative to flashes during pursuit. This effect is not specific for horizontal pursuit but was also found in other directions. In a second experiment, we examined how this effect generalizes to positions outside the line of eye movement. We found that large localization errors were found in the entire hemifield ahead of the pursuit target and were predominantly aligned with the direction of eye movement. In a third experiment, we determined whether it is the flash or the static object that is mislocalized ahead of the pursuit target. In contrast to fixation conditions, we found that during pursuit it is the flash, not the static object, which is mislocalized. In a fourth experiment, we used egocentric localization to confirm this result. Our results suggest that the CNS compensates for the retinal localization errors to maintain position constancy for static objects during pursuit. This compensation is achieved in the process of sensorimotor integration of retinal and gaze signals: different retinal areas are integrated with different gaze signals to guarantee the stability of the visual world.

Owing to several reasons (e.g. changing light conditions) the measurement of eye movement behaviour is often unstable and data loss can occur. It is investigated whether head movement recording could be an alternative to eye movement analysis for measuring distraction through visual secondary tasks in driving. During a 1-h drive in the driving simulator, 16 participants conducted a self-paced menu system task that was designed according to design principles for commercial in-vehicle information systems. Influence of visual distraction was analysed and compared for parameters of eye and head movement. Parameters like percent road centre for head and eye movement and proportion of head movement were calculated. The results show that head movement analysis can differentiate nearly as well between distracted and attentive driving as parameters based on eye movement recording in this task context. It is concluded that head movement analysis seems to be a promising alternative for assessing drivers’ distraction under certain circumstances.

This study explored the dynamics of steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) amid unrestricted head and eye movements using immersive virtual reality (VR) to concurrently record eye and head movement data with a 64-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) during a visual fixation task. Employing a dual-condition approach-eye-shifting and head-turning-the trials were time-locked to stimulus onset, Gaze Intersection Point (GIP) onset, and fixation onset. Eye and head velocity, Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) correlation, and Inter-Trial Coherence (ITC) were computed across the trial duration. SSVEP signal detection (reflected in CCA scores) was most closely aligned with the GIP onset. The CCA score increase before fixation suggests that visual processing is not fully suppressed during simultaneous head and eye movements. These findings support the potential of SSVEP for tracking the time course of visual processing in naturalistic settings where research participants are free to move their heads and eyes as they explore their three-dimensional environment.

The patterns of optic flow seen during self-motion can be used to determine the direction of one's own heading. Tracking eye movements which typically occur during everyday life alter this task since they add further retinal image motion and (predictably) distort the retinal flow pattern. Humans employ both visual and nonvisual (extraretinal) information to solve a heading task in such case. Likewise, it has been shown that neurons in the monkey medial superior temporal area (area MST) use both signals during the processing of self-motion information. In this article we report that neurons in the macaque ventral intraparietal area (area VIP) use visual information derived from the distorted flow patterns to encode heading during (simulated) eye movements. We recorded responses of VIP neurons to simple radial flow fields and to distorted flow fields that simulated self-motion plus eye movements. In 59% of the cases, cell responses compensated for the distortion and kept the same heading selectivity irrespective of different simulated eye movements. In addition, response modulations during real compared with simulated eye movements were smaller, being consistent with reafferent signaling involved in the processing of the visual consequences of eye movements in area VIP. We conclude that the motion selectivities found in area VIP, like those in area MST, provide a way to successfully analyze and use flow fields during self-motion and simultaneous tracking movements.