Observations upon the Role of the Peripheral Retina in the Execution of Eye Movements

Abstract

A variety of experimental situations are described concerning optokinetic nystagmus and tracking movements of the eyes, which have shown that in certain circumstances the peripheral retina can exert a powerful influence upon the resultant response. The teleological significance of the findings is discussed in the context of the mechanisms subserving ocular-following movements.

Visual-Vestibular Interactions. I. Influence of Peripheral Vision on Suppression of the Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex and Visual Acuity.

“…When surrounded by a large moving field, an observer may choose to gaze inattentively at the field without specifically trying to follow particular detail; under these circumstances, "passive OKN" is generated (16,17). If a small head-fixed target is placed in view in front of the moving field, the observer can suppress OKN, but a compelling illusion of self-motion, called circularvection (10,11), quickly commences.…”

“…If a small head-fixed target is placed in view in front of the moving field, the observer can suppress OKN, but a compelling illusion of self-motion, called circularvection (10,11), quickly commences. On the other hand, if the observer tries to follow the moving visual detail, then "active OKN" develops (16,17) which is intermittently stronger than passive OKN, but the Illusion of self motion is intermittent, develops only slowly, and is not compelling. Moreover, when vision Is restricted to moving central fields, whole-body motion is not perceived (6,10,11).…”

“…The purpose of the study is twofold: 1) to determine whether or not previous findings (4) can be confirmed when more definitive and potentially more compelling background movement is present and if so, 2) to provide a fairly simple short procedure for measuring differences In effects with differences in background movwment. In connection with the latter goal, it has been suggested that visual motion inputs are processed by two neural systems, the one arising from foveal stimuli and responsible for active optokinetlc nystagmus (OKN) and resolution of fine detail, and the other arising from the peripheral retina and responsible for passive OKN and the perception of body movement in space (16,17,19). Current clinical tests (9,18) do not address the potential role of the peripheral retina in altering visual-vestibular interactions.…”

Human smooth and saccadic eye movements during voluntary pursuit of different target motions on different backgrounds.

“…In the absence of the actual values for velocity of target and background used by Ter Braak, it is hard to compare his findings with our results. Hood (1975) did some preliminary experiments on pursuit of a target which moved in darkness or upon a striped background. In normal subjects he found no effect.…”

Right Angular Lesion and Selective Impairment of Motion Vision in Left Visual Field.

“…Furthermore, while OKN was normally elicited by an optokinetic tape in our patient, this method stimulates the central and pericentral rather than peripheral parts of the visual field. Several studies indicated that there may be some differences in features of OKN elicited by moving stimuli to different parts of retina (Hood 1975 ;Cheng and Outerbridge 1975;Dubois and Collewijn 1979), and that OKN is frequently impaired by the posterior parietal lesions (Smith and Cogan 1959;Hyvarinen 1982;Lynch and McLaren 1983). Therefore, some abnormalities of OKN would have been detected in our patient, if the peripheral and central parts of each hemifields were stimulated separately under electro-oculographic recording.…”