title: Microsaccades: A microcosm for research on oculomotor control, attention, and visual perception.
abstract: Miniature eye movements occur involuntarily during visual fixation. The most prominent contribution to these fixational eye movements is generated by microsaccades, which are rapid small-amplitude saccades with a rate of about one per second. Recent work demonstrates that microsaccades are optimized to counteract perceptual fading during perception of a stationary scene. Furthermore, microsaccades are modulated by visual attention and turned out to generate rich spatio-temporal dynamics. We conclude that the investigation of microsaccades will evolve into a new research field contributing to many facets of oculomotor control, visual perception, and the allocation of attention.
authors.affiliation: Computational Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam, PO Box 601553, 14415 Potsdam, Germany. engbert@rz.uni-pstdam.de
authors.forename: Ralf
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Engbert
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D009801:Oculomotor Muscles; D011601:Psychophysics; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*