Involuntary Eye Movement during Fixation Depends on Spatio-Temporal Frequency of Stimuli

摘要

Our eyes oscillate small and rapidly, even while we gaze at something. Visual objects become to fade and we can see nothing, if involuntary eye movement is eliminated temporarily. Involuntary eye movement is essential to acquire visual information. As preliminary experiment, we have been recorded eye movement when filling-in, one of famous visual illusions, occurs in our peripheral vision (EMBEC2008). These experiments suggested that eye movement depends on the attributes of visual stimuli. In this study, we focus on spatio-temporal frequency as an attribute of visual stimuli in order to understand spatio-temporal frequency property in the pathway of human vision. In this study, we measured eye movement during fixation when 16 random-dot dynamic textures that have various frequency bands in spatially and temporally, are presented to the subjects as visual stimuli. The result shows that eye movement depends on both spatial and temporal frequencies of visual stimuli. The eye movement includes higher frequency components, in other words, higher velocity components, when visual stimulus has higher spatial frequency and/or higher temporal frequency.