Our lab participated in this year’s Japanese Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting.
Our contribution was part of a collaboration with our previous graduate student, Chih-Yang Chen! In our previous work, we had shown with Chen that visual sensitivity in the superior colliculus (SC) is enhanced prior to microsaccades. This was related to our broader efforts linking microsaccades and attention, like in this study. Now, we decided to explore the role of different spatial frequencies of images.
We found that the enhancement in visual sensitivity prior to microsaccades can alter the preferred spatial frequencies of SC neurons. This effect causes a bit of “equalization” in the spectral properties of the neurons, where high spatial frequencies (typically not preferred by the SC), get a boost in their visual sensitivity. Thus, pre-microsaccadic enhancement can highlight specific spectral ranges of input images in the SC. This work continues our efforts to document how visual representations can be influenced by eye movements in general, large and small.
