The Eyes Have It

Wednesday, February 25, 2009 - 09:07 in Physics & Chemistry

Microsaccades are tiny involuntary eye movements that are instrumental in vision, because they prevent the fading of stationary objects from the visual field. Without the tiny movements, objects could become invisible to the retina. Researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix previously showed that these eye movements occur when the gaze is fixed on a specific point, like a dot or a cross projected on a screen. But it was unproven whether or not these findings could be generalized to more complicated, natural visual tasks, like freely looking at objects in a scene, or picking a face out of a crowd. read more

Read the whole article on PopSci

More from PopSci

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net