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  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Rolfs, Martin
A1  - Laubrock, Jochen
A1  - Kliegl, Reinhold
T1  - Shortening and Prolongation of Saccade Latencies Following Microsaccades
N2  - When the eyes fixate at a point in a visual scene, small saccades rapidly shift the image on the retina. The effect of these microsaccades on the latency of subsequent large-scale saccades may be twofold. First, microsaccades are associated with an enhancement of visual perception. Their occurrence during saccade target perception should, thus, decrease saccade latencies. On the other hand, microsaccades likely indicate activity in fixation-related oculomotor neurons. These represent competitors to saccade-related cells in the interplay of gaze holding and shifting. Consequently, an increase in saccade latencies after microsaccades would be expected. Here, we present evidence for both aspects of microsaccadic impact on saccade latency. In a delayed response task, participants made saccades to visible or memorized targets. First, microsaccade occurrence up to 50 ms before target disappearance correlated with 18 ms (or 8%) faster saccades to memorized targets. Second, if microsaccades occurred shortly (i.e., < 150 ms) before a saccade was required, saccadic reaction times in visual and memory trials were increased by about 40 ms (or 16%). Hence, microsaccades can have opposite consequences for saccade latencies, pointing at a differential role of these fixational eye movements in preparation of motor programs.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - paper 242 
KW  - Fixational eye movements
KW  - Memory-guided saccades
KW  - Visually-guided saccades
Y1  - 2006
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-57012
ER  -