TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lange, Elke B.
A1  - Zweck, Fabian
A1  - Sinn, Petra
T1  - Microsaccade-rate indicates absorption by music listening
JF  - Consciousness and cognition
N2  - The power of music is a literary topos, which can be attributed to intense and personally significant experiences, one of them being the state of absorption. Such phenomenal states are difficult to grasp objectively. We investigated the state of musical absorption by using eye tracking. We utilized a load related definition of state absorption: multimodal resources are committed to create a unified representation of music. Resource allocation was measured indirectly by microsaccade rate, known to indicate cognitive processing load. We showed in Exp. 1 that microsaccade rate also indicates state absorption. Hence, there is cross-modal coupling between an auditory aesthetic experience and fixational eye movements. When removing the fixational stimulus in Exp. 2, saccades are no longer generated upon visual input and the cross modal coupling disappeared. Results are interpreted in favor of the load hypothesis of micro saccade rate and against the assumption of general slowing by state absorption.
KW  - Microsaccades
KW  - Fixational eye movements
KW  - Absorption
KW  - Music
KW  - Aesthetics
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2017.07.009
SN  - 1053-8100
SN  - 1090-2376
VL  - 55
SP  - 59
EP  - 78
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - San Diego
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Meyberg, Susann
A1  - Sinn, Petra
A1  - Engbert, Ralf
A1  - Sommer, Werner
T1  - Revising the link between microsaccades and the spatial cueing of voluntary attention
JF  - Vision research : an international journal for functional aspects of vision.
N2  - Microsaccades - i.e., small fixational saccades generated in the superior colliculus (SC) - have been linked to spatial attention. While maintaining fixation, voluntary shifts of covert attention toward peripheral targets result in a sequence of attention-aligned and attention-opposing microsaccades. In most previous studies the direction of the voluntary shift is signaled by a spatial cue (e.g., a leftwards pointing arrow) that presents the most informative part of the cue (e.g., the arrowhead) in the to-be attended visual field. Here we directly investigated the influence of cue position and tested the hypothesis that microsaccades align with cue position rather than with the attention shift. In a spatial cueing task, we presented the task-relevant part of a symmetric cue either in the to-be attended visual field or in the opposite field. As a result, microsaccades were still weakly related to the covert attention shift; however, they were strongly related to the position of the cue even if that required a movement opposite to the cued attention shift. Moreover, if microsaccades aligned with cue position, we observed stronger cueing effects on manual response times. Our interpretation of the data is supported by numerical simulations of a computational model of microsaccade generation that is based on SC properties, where we explain our findings by separate attentional mechanisms for cue localization and the cued attention shift. We conclude that during cueing of voluntary attention, microsaccades are related to both - the overt attentional selection of the task-relevant part of the cue stimulus and the subsequent covert attention shift.(C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
KW  - Endogenous attention
KW  - Visual search
KW  - Fixational eye movements
KW  - Posner cueing
KW  - Superior colliculus
KW  - Computational modelling
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2017.01.001
SN  - 0042-6989
SN  - 1878-5646
VL  - 133
SP  - 47
EP  - 60
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  -