Troxler Fading, Eye Movements, and Retinal Ganglion Cell Properties

Bachy, Romain; Zaidi, Qasim

doi:10.1068/i0679sas

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Second, saccadic suppression (Bridgeman et al 1975) limits the communication of visual data through the visual system during self-generated eye movements, suggesting that it is the data garnered during fixations that are used to constrain perceptual inference. Third, the importance of foveation is illustrated in psychophysical data investigating the relationship between stimulus eccentricity and fading (Lou 1999; Bachy and Zaidi 2014). Faster fading of more eccentric stimuli implies that the choice of fixation location is important and is consistent with the reduced precision associated with data from the retinal periphery relative to the fovea.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual awareness and active inference

Parr

Corcoran

Friston

et al. 2019

Neuroscience of Consciousness

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Perceptual awareness depends upon the way in which we engage with our sensorium. This notion is central to active inference, a theoretical framework that treats perception and action as inferential processes. This variational perspective on cognition formalizes the notion of perception as hypothesis testing and treats actions as experiments that are designed (in part) to gather evidence for or against alternative hypotheses. The common treatment of perception and action affords a useful interpretation of certain perceptual phenomena whose active component is often not acknowledged. In this article, we start by considering Troxler fading – the dissipation of a peripheral percept during maintenance of fixation, and its recovery during free (saccadic) exploration. This offers an important example of the failure to maintain a percept without actively interrogating a visual scene. We argue that this may be understood in terms of the accumulation of uncertainty about a hypothesized stimulus when free exploration is disrupted by experimental instructions or pathology. Once we take this view, we can generalize the idea of using bodily (oculomotor) action to resolve uncertainty to include the use of mental (attentional) actions for the same purpose. This affords a useful way to think about binocular rivalry paradigms, in which perceptual changes need not be associated with an overt movement.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual awareness and active inference

Parr

Corcoran

Friston

et al. 2019

Neuroscience of Consciousness

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show abstract

“…This weak short-term adaptation might be easily counteracted by the dramatic changes that accompany saccades, for example by the motion streaks caused by the rapid movement of the eyes ( Burr and Ross, 1982 ), which may be so disruptive that they are suppressed (to some extent probably actively) from conscious perception (for reviews, see Ross et al, 2001 ; Ibbotson and Krekelberg, 2011 ; Binda and Morrone, 2018 ). Indeed, the retinal input caused by a saccade-like motion has been shown to strongly alter spiking activity of retinal ganglion cells (e.g., Roska and Werblin, 2003 ; Idrees et al, 2020 ), and it is known that simple on-and-off flashing of a stimulus (attempting to imitate the effect of saccades) can delay its perceptual fading ( Cornsweet, 1956 ; Bachy and Zaidi, 2014 ). However, it has been shown that unnaturally long adaptation (≥3 s) can survive a saccade and influence perception in humans (e.g., Melcher, 2005 ; 2007 ; Knapen et al, 2010 ; He et al, 2018 ) and that more natural short-term adaptation can attenuate contrast sensitivity and V1 activity across saccades in macaque monkeys ( Gawne and Woods, 2003 ; Niemeyer and Paradiso, 2017 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rapid visual adaptation persists across saccades

Hübner

Schütz

2021

iScience

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Summary Neurons in the visual cortex quickly adapt to constant input, which should lead to perceptual fading within few tens of milliseconds. However, perceptual fading is rarely observed in everyday perception, possibly because eye movements refresh retinal input. Recently, it has been suggested that amplitudes of large saccadic eye movements are scaled to maximally decorrelate presaccadic and postsaccadic inputs and thus to annul perceptual fading. However, this argument builds on the assumption that adaptation within naturally brief fixation durations is strong enough to survive any visually disruptive saccade and affect perception. We tested this assumption by measuring the effect of luminance adaptation on postsaccadic contrast perception. We found that postsaccadic contrast perception was affected by presaccadic luminance adaptation during brief periods of fixation. This adaptation effect emerges within 100 milliseconds and persists over seconds. These results indicate that adaptation during natural fixation periods can affect perception even after visually disruptive saccades.

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Stimulus-dependent delay of perceptual filling-in by microsaccades

Levinson,

Pack,

Baillet

2024

Preprint

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Perception is a function of both stimulus features and active sensory sampling. The illusion of perceptual filling-in occurs when eye gaze is kept still: visual boundary perception may fail, causing adjacent visual features to remarkably merge into one uniform visual surface. Microsaccades—small, involuntary eye movements during gaze fixation—counteract perceptual filling-in, but the mechanisms underlying this process are not well understood. We investigated whether microsaccade efficacy for preventing filling-in depends on two boundary properties, color contrast and retinal eccentricity (distance from gaze center). Twenty-one participants fixated on a point until they experienced filling-in between two isoluminant colored surfaces. We found that increased color contrast independently extends the duration before filling-in but does not alter the impact of individual microsaccades. Conversely, lower eccentricity delayed filling-in only by increasing microsaccade efficacy. We propose that microsaccades facilitate stable boundary perception via a transient retinal motion signal that scales with eccentricity but is invariant to boundary contrast. These results shed light on how incessant eye movements integrate with ongoing stimulus processing to stabilize perceptual detail, with implications for visual rehabilitation and the optimization of visual presentations in virtual and augmented reality environments.

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Troxler Fading, Eye Movements, and Retinal Ganglion Cell Properties

Cited by 6 publications

References 6 publications

Perceptual awareness and active inference

Perceptual awareness and active inference

Rapid visual adaptation persists across saccades

Stimulus-dependent delay of perceptual filling-in by microsaccades

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