Fixational eye movements: about a binocular slow control mechanism

Abstract: Even when we look at stationary objects, involuntarily our eyes perform miniature movements and do not stand perfectly still. Such fixational eye movements (FEM) can be decomposed into at least two components: rapid microsaccades and slow (physiological) drift. Despite the general agreement that microsaccades have a central generating mechanism, the origin of drift is less clear. A direct approach to investigate whether drift is also centrally controlled or merely represents peripheral uncorrelated oculomotor noise is to quantify the statistical dependence between the velocity components of the FEM. Here we investigate the dependence between horizontal and vertical velocity components across the eyes during a visual fixation task with human observers. The results are compared with computer-generated surrogate time series containing only drift or only microsaccades. Our analyses show a binocular dependence between FEM velocity components predominantly due to drift. This result supports the existence of a central generating mechanism that modulates not only microsaccades but also drift and helps to explain the neuronal mechanism generating FEM.