We have a new paper in press in the Journal of Neurophysiology, and led by Tatiana Malevich and Antimo Buonocore!
The paper investigated the stimulus properties that can change how microsaccades are affected by sudden visual cue onsets. It was previously known that sudden stimulus onsets change the rate and direction of microsaccades (e.g. here). In our paper, we investigated whether stimulus contrast polarity (i.e. white versus black stimuli) alters the properties of stimulus-induced modulations of microsaccades. We also investigated what happens with large versus small stimuli.
We found that both stimulus size and stimulus polarity have substantial impacts on how microsaccades are affected by visual cue onsets. These results, and particularly the stimulus polarity ones, will help us to understand what pathways drive microsaccadic modulations. For example, stimulus polarity matters a great deal for several phenomena that we are currently investigating in the lab, such as here, here, here, or here.
These results also help us to investigate the brainstem pathways for modulating small eye movements, whether microsaccadic or otherwise, as we recently suggested. The next step would be to link both findings using neurophysiological investigations.
The full article text for the paper can be read here.
And, as always, stay tuned for more work from our lab on the neurophysiology of cue-induced microsaccadic modulations!
