THE ASSESMENT OF THE ROLE OF MICROSACCADIC EYE MOVEMENTS IN BISTABLE MOTION PERCEPTION

Even during fixation, the eye is rarely still, as miniature eye movements continue to occur within fixational periods of the eye. These miniature movements are referred to as fixational eye movements. Microsaccades are one of the three types of fixational eye movements that have been identified. Microsaccades have been attributed to different visual processes/phenomena such as fixation stability, perceptual fading, and multistable perception. Still, debates surrounding the functional role of microsaccades in vision ensued, as many of the findings from earlier microsaccade reports contradict one another and the polarity in the field caused by these debates led many to believe that microsaccades do not hold a necessary/specialized role in vision. To gain a deeper understanding of microsaccades and its relevance in vision, we sought out to assess the role of microsaccades in bistable motion perception in our behavioral/eye-tracking study. Observers participated in an eye-tracking experiment where they were asked to complete a motion discrimination task while viewing a bistable apparent motion stimuli. The collected eye-tracking data was then used to train a classification model to predict directions of illusory motion perceived by observers. We found that small changes in gaze position during fixation, occurring within or outside microsaccadic events, predicted the direction of motion pattern imposed by the motion stimuli. Our findings suggest that microsaccades and fixational eye movements are correlated with motion perception and that miniature eye movements occurring during fixation may have relevance in vision.