生物谷報道：凝視性眼睛運動指的是眼睛不自覺的微小運動,，或稱“視網(wǎng)膜抖動”,，是在我們盯住某個東西看時發(fā)生的,。這種運動的功能自其在上個世紀50年代首次被發(fā)現(xiàn)以來一直是一個有爭議的問題。Rucci等人通過將心理物理實驗與對進入眼睛,、以抵消眼睛運動的視覺效應的視覺信號所做的統(tǒng)計分析結合起來,，發(fā)現(xiàn)如果沒有這些運動，我們對細微信息的感知就會降低,。這表明,，凝視性眼睛運動是大腦用來從視覺信息中提取細節(jié)內容的一個策略的構成部分。
英文原文：
Nature 447, 852-855 (14 June 2007) | doi:10.1038/nature05866; Received 5 March 2007; Accepted 18 April 2007
Miniature eye movements enhance fine spatial detail
Michele Rucci1, Ramon Iovin1, Martina Poletti1 & Fabrizio Santini1
Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA
Correspondence to: Michele Rucci1 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to M.R. (Email: [email protected]).
Abstract
Our eyes are constantly in motion. Even during visual fixation, small eye movements continually jitter the location of gaze1, 2, 3, 4. It is known that visual percepts tend to fade when retinal image motion is eliminated in the laboratory5, 6, 7, 8, 9. However, it has long been debated whether, during natural viewing, fixational eye movements have functions in addition to preventing the visual scene from fading10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. In this study, we analysed the influence in humans of fixational eye movements on the discrimination of gratings masked by noise that has a power spectrum similar to that of natural images. Using a new method of retinal image stabilization18, we selectively eliminated the motion of the retinal image that normally occurs during the intersaccadic intervals of visual fixation. Here we show that fixational eye movements improve discrimination of high spatial frequency stimuli, but not of low spatial frequency stimuli. This improvement originates from the temporal modulations introduced by fixational eye movements in the visual input to the retina, which emphasize the high spatial frequency harmonics of the stimulus. In a natural visual world dominated by low spatial frequencies, fixational eye movements appear to constitute an effective sampling strategy by which the visual system enhances the processing of spatial detail.
