Crossmodal coupling of oculomotor control and spatial attention in vision and audition

Abstract

Word count (including main text, footnotes, table and figure captions): 6677Abstract Fixational eye movements occur involuntarily during visual fixation of stationary scenes.The fastest components of these miniature eye movements are microsaccades, which can be we generalized this finding in two ways. First, we used peripheral cues, rather than the centrally presented cues of earlier studies. Second, we spatially cued attention in vision and audition to visual and auditory targets. An analysis of microsaccade responses revealed an equivalent impact of visual and auditory cues on microsaccade-rate signature (i.e., an initial inhibition followed by an overshoot and a final return to the pre-cue baseline rate). With visual cues or visual targets, microsaccades were briefly aligned with cue direction and then opposite to cue direction during the overshoot epoch, probably as a result of an inhibition of an automatic saccade to the peripheral cue. With left auditory cues and auditory targets microsaccades oriented in cue direction. Thus, microsaccades can be used to study crossmodal integration of sensory information and to map the time course of saccade preparation during covert shifts of visual and auditory attention.

Computational Modeling of Collicular Integration of Perceptual Responses and Attention in Microsaccades

“…4 A). Auditory cues produce intermediate cueincongruent effects (Rolfs et al, 2005) that are captured by model simulations with a short-delay, but slow potential change (Fig. 4 B).…”

“…4C). Finally, the model generated the more complicated pattern with cue-congruent as well as cue-incongruent microsaccade effects for exogenous cues (Laubrock et al, 2005;Rolfs et al, 2005) (Fig. 4D).…”

“…Since the model's movement potential is the dynamical mechanism underlying the intention to fixate a particular location, a temporal variation of the slope of the potential can be used to implement effects of display changes and top-down selective attention (Hafed and Clark, 2002;Engbert and Kliegl, 2003;Rolfs et al, 2004Rolfs et al, , 2005Laubrock et al, 2005). We assume that a display change induces a transient global reduction of the slope of the potential (Fig.…”

“…The first studies on fixational eye movements in the context of attentional cueing tasks (Fig. 1 A) indicated that microsaccades produce a cue-congruent bias (Hafed and Clark, 2002;Engbert and Kliegl, 2003); however, a series of later experiments demonstrated that both cue-congruent and cue-incongruent microsaccadic responses can be found (Rolfs et al, 2004(Rolfs et al, , 2005Laubrock et al, 2005) (Fig. 1 B).…”

Microsaccadic modulation of response times in spatial attention tasks

“…For example, in response to any sudden-onset event (such as a visual or an auditory cue), the rate quickly declines from the baseline rate of 1-0.2 Hz and then raises back to the baseline level or twice the baseline rate (e.g., Rolfs et al 2005). Weak cues (e.g., color vs. arrows as central cues) induce a slower development of this pattern (Engbert & Kliegl, 2003).…”