Our lab is participating in this year’s virtual version of the Vision Sciences Society (VSS) conference. This meeting is special because it marks the 20th anniversary of VSS. In our first participation, we also visit an almost 20-year-old problem: that of the link between microsaccades and covert attention shifts. The video below describes Tong’s latest work on this topic, in collaboration with our earlier student Tian. As is known, almost 20 years ago, at approximately the birth of VSS, a link between microsaccades and attention was first described (Hafed and Clark, 2002). Intriguingly, in that paper, we also noticed that on trials in which perceptual discrimination happened without microsaccades, attentional effects were gone. This suggests that there might be a one-to-one link between microsaccades and attentional performance effects. This is something that we later confirmed in other work (e.g. Hafed, Neuron, 2013; Chen et al., Current Biology, 2015). Moreover, we also found that in attentional tasks, microsaccades occur to correct tiny motor errors at fixation (i.e. to optimize eye position) (Tian et al., Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 2016). What remained unknown is the direction of causality. Can an induced tiny motor error in the fovea be sufficient to causally influence extra-foveal peripheral visual sensitivity? In the video below, showing a sneak peek of our VSS presentation, Tong used our real-time gaze-contingent experimental approach to causally induce microsaccades and showed that this was sufficient to influence peripheral performance. We have therefore now reached an important closure point to the idea that there is a one-to-one link between microsaccade generation and attentional performance effects!
In our second presentation, Tanya and Antimo tackled another big challenge in the field of fixational eye movements. They asked whether tiny ocular position drifts can be stimulus-affected, like microsaccades were discovered to be during the past 2 decades of VSS. Tanya and Antimo found a very intriguing result indeed, again summarised in the video below showing a sneak peek of our VSS presentation.