OCULOMOTOR BEHAVIOR OF BLIND PATIENTS SEEING THROUGH A RETINAL IMPLANT

Finding the target

The movie below shows eye position in real-time from an example trial of a blind patient attempting to find a visual target (see Fig. 7 of Hafed et al., Vision Research, 2015). As can be seen, fixation became stable when the subject reported seeing the stimulus, and the onset and offset of a percept were highly dependent on eye position relative to the stimulus location. For example, the patient only found the stimulus a second time when his eye position was similar to the eye position for the first visibility interval. Also, note that after losing visibility the second time, the patient was searching within the vicinity of the remembered target location, suggesting a form of learning of scene statistics to guide his eye movements.