title: The unsteady eye: an information-processing stage, not a bug.
abstract: How is space represented in the visual system? At first glance, the answer to this fundamental question appears straightforward: spatial information is directly encoded in the locations of neurons within maps. This concept has long dominated visual neuroscience, leading to mainstream theories of how neurons encode information. However, an accumulation of evidence indicates that this purely spatial view is incomplete and that, even for static images, the representation is fundamentally spatiotemporal. The evidence for this new understanding centers on recent experimental findings concerning the functional role of fixational eye movements, the tiny movements humans and other species continually perform, even when attending to a single point. We review some of these findings and discuss their functional implications.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA; Graduate Program in Neuroscience, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA. Electronic address: mrucci@bu.edu.
authors.forename: Michele
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rucci
authors.affiliation: Brain and Mind Research Institute, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY 10065, USA.
authors.forename: Jonathan D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Victor
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D009799:Ocular Physiological Phenomena; D014795:Visual Pathways / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: eye movements; microsaccades; neural encoding; ocular drift; retina; vision