Fixational eye movements and neural code studies


Most of our visual experience is driven by the eye movements we produce while we fixate our gaze. In a sense, our visual system thus has a built-in contradiction: when we direct our gaze at an object of interest, our eyes are never still. Therefore the perception, physiology, and computational modeling of fixational eye movements is critical to our understanding of vision in general, and also to the understanding of the neural computations that work to overcome neural adaptation in normal subjects as well as in clinical patients. Moreover, because we are not aware of our fixational eye movements, they can also help us understand the underpinnings of visual awareness. Over the last decade, we have studied the neuronal and perceptual correlates of fixational eye movements. Our long-term objectives are to build on our previous discoveries concerning the neural activity driven by fixational eye movements, and to also discover the oculomotor basis for generating fixational eye movements. We have moreover begun to study the importance of fixational eye movements for visual perception in normal vision and in visual disease.

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