Clinical and Oculomotor Eye-Tracking Publications
EyeLink eye tracker clinical and oculomotor research publications up until 2025 (with some early 2026s) are listed below by year. You can search the eye-tracking publications using keywords such as Saccadic Adaptation, Schizophrenia, Nystagmus, etc. You can also search for individual author names, and limit searches by year (choose the year then click the search button). If we missed any EyeLink clinical or oculomotor articles, please email us!
2026 |
Zebo Lan; Meihua Guo; Nina Liu; Guoli Yan; Valerie Benson Language experience and reading ability modulate word recognition in deaf readers Journal Article In: Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, vol. 31, pp. 41–57, 2026. @article{Lan2026,For most deaf readers, learning to read is a challenging task. Visual word recognition is crucial during reading; however, little is known about the cognitive mechanism of Chinese deaf readers during visual word recognition. In the present study, two experiments explored the activation of orthographic, phonological, and sign language representations during Chinese word recognition. Eye movements were recorded as participants read sentences containing orthographically similar words, homophones, sign language–related words, or unrelated words. All deaf readers showed shorter reading times for orthographically similar words compared to unrelated words. However, when the reading ability was controlled, the homophone advantage was observed only for deaf readers with more oral language experience, whereas the sign language advantage was observed only for deaf readers with more sign language experience. When language experience was controlled, in comparison to deaf readers with lower reading fluency levels, those with higher reading fluency levels had more stable orthographic and sign language representations. Deaf college readers with more oral language experience activate word meanings through orthographic and phonological representation, whereas deaf college readers with more sign language experience activate word meanings through orthographic and sign language representation, reflecting a unique cognitive mechanism, and reading ability moderates this process. |
Kaitlyn N. Drennan; Nicholas Gaspelin What can a half-million saccades tell us about distractor suppression? Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 269, pp. 1–14, 2026. @article{Drennan2026,Salient distractions in the environment compete for attention and have the potential to interfere with our goals. An abundance of research has therefore examined how we learn to prevent distraction by salient stimuli. There is growing consensus that salient stimuli can be suppressed to mitigate distraction. However, many questions about distractor suppression have been difficult to resolve in typical studies that use small sample sizes. The current study is a pooled analysis of several previous eye-tracking studies (N = 354) which resulted in a large data set of more than a half-million eye movements. This large data set was used to uncover new findings that improve our understanding of the attentional processes involved in distractor suppression. We also evaluated several new findings related to how attentional suppression is learned and is influenced by selection history. Altogether, these findings highlight the need for a hybrid model of attention that includes both bottom-up and top-down components. Moreover, this large publicly available dataset can be used by future research to investigate other questions related to attentional capture and distractor suppression. |
Ting Zhang; Shujia Zhang; Yi Jiang Automatic pupillary responses to pain perception in adults and children: The influence of race and autistic traits Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 268, pp. 1–9, 2026. @article{Zhang2026d,The ability to understand and share others' emotional states (e.g., feeling of pain) plays a fundamental role in survival and prosocial behavior. The current study utilized pupillometry to assess automatic psychophysiological responses to others' painful facial expressions in both adults and children (N = 72). Results revealed that pupil size significantly increased when perceiving painful versus neutral expressions, independent of low-level visual features. Notably, both adults and children exhibited a racial in-group bias, with pupil dilation effects observed only for same-race painful faces. Furthermore, individuals' Autism Spectrum Quotient scores were negatively correlated with pupil dilation effects toward painful expressions of same-race faces. These findings suggest that pupillary responses might reflect automatic empathic arousal to others' pain and are modulated by racial group membership and autistic traits, providing a potential physiological indicator, at least at the group level, for probing affective resonance in children or individuals with socio-cognitive disorders (e.g., autism spectrum disorder). |
Alexia Galati; Rick Dale; Camila Alviar; Moreno I. Coco Task goals constrain the alignment in eye-movements and speech during interpersonal coordination Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 146, pp. 1–18, 2026. @article{Galati2026,Collaborative task performance is assumed to benefit from interpersonal coordination between interacting individuals. Prominent views of language use and social behavior, including the Interactive Alignment Model (IAM; Pickering & Garrod, 2004), support this view by building on tasks that require monitoring a partner's perspective (e.g., in route planning), proposing that behavioral alignment enables conceptual convergence. However, the role of alignment in tasks requiring complementarity (e.g., a “divide and conquer” strategy during joint visual search) remains underexplored. We address this gap by manipulating task goals (route planning vs. visual search) as forty dyads completed ten trials involving subway maps while their eye movements and speech were co-registered. We used Cross Recurrence Quantification Analysis (CRQA) to examine the temporal relationships between partners' eye fixations and word sequences, generating measures that reveal similarity and dynamic coupling. Dyads exhibited more gaze alignment in route planning than visual search across a range of CRQA metrics. Gaze alignment also varied across the trial and related differently to accuracy: in visual search, greater alignment late in the trial predicted better performance. In speech, route planning prompted longer and more entropic word sequences, but lower overall recurrence than visual search. This finding suggests that the two modalities organize in a compensatory fashion to support distinct task demands. These results support a theoretical framework more general than IAM, in which interactive alignment emerges as a consequence of dynamic adaptation to task goals. Overall, task goals constrain how people coordinate behavior and offer insights into how collaborating partners distribute their multimodal contributions. |
Anisha Khosla; R. Shayna Rosenbaum; Morris Moscovitch; Jennifer D. Ryan Spatial updating in amnesia using an eye movement analogue of a path integration task Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 222, pp. 1–17, 2026. @article{Khosla2026,Path integration (PI) allows organisms to navigate home by updating their location in reference to the route's starting point. We previously demonstrated a PI-like process in eye movements using an eyetracking version of commonly used PI tasks. As the hippocampus/medial temporal lobes (MTL) have been implicated in updating self-position via whole-body PI, we investigated whether the hippocampus/MTL is necessary for the spatial updating of gaze position. Using our eyetracking PI-analog task, we tested two individuals with hippocampal lesions, DA and BL; BL's hippocampal damage is relatively circumscribed to his dentate gyrus, but he has additional volume loss in the right precuneus and left superior-posterior parietal cortex. Participants followed routes with their eyes guided by visual onsets and, when subsequently cued, returned to the starting point or mid-route location. Surprisingly, despite DA's extensive MTL damage, his accuracy was comparable to that of control participants, but unlike the control participants, he showed increased saccade latency and little to no gaze revisits to enroute locations when returning to the start location. BL's accuracy was reduced relative to that of the control participants. Additionally, in contrast to DA, BL demonstrated an increased reliance on overt, enroute revisits. The behavior of the two amnesic cases, who each differ from the control participants and show distinct patterns from one another, suggests that spatial updating of gaze position reflects interactive processes supported by the hippocampus/MTL and posterior parietal cortex. |
Jui-Tai Chen; Yi-Hsuan Chang; Cesar Barquero; Chin-An Wang Pupil dynamics reveal preparatory processes in the generation of pro-saccades and anti-saccades in open skill sports athletes Journal Article In: Biology of Sport, vol. 43, pp. 77–94, 2026. @article{Chen2026,This study investigated pupil dynamics to establish a physiological index of mental processes associated with executive functioning, enabling objective evaluation of cognitive load during training to improve understanding of cognitive control in sport-specific contexts. Using video-based eye-tracking, we examined pupil and saccade responses in athletes (N = 40) and non-athletes (N = 40) performing an interleaved pro- saccade and anti-saccade task. In this task, participants were instructed prior to target appearance to either make a reflexive saccade toward the target (pro-saccade) or inhibit that response and generate a voluntary saccade in the opposite direction (anti-saccade). Larger pupil dilation prior to target onset was observed during anti-saccade compared to pro-saccade preparation (p < 0.001, ηp² = 0.153). Athletes showed reduced pupil dilation compared to non-athletes (p < 0.05, ηp² = 0.049). In addition, trials with larger pupil dilation and smaller tonic pupil sizes were associated with faster saccade reaction times. Pupil dilation also positively correlated with saccade peak velocities but showed no association with saccade endpoint accuracy. These findings suggest that athletes may engage in more efficient motor preparation, as reflected by reduced pupil dilation. Moreover, phasic pupil dilation, indexing cognitive load, and tonic pupil size, associated with arousal level, both contributed to the control of saccade dynamics during goal-directed movements. Together, these results highlight the utility of pupil size as an objective and informative index for assessing both cognitive and arousal functions in sports science research. |
Anne Friede; Albrecht Inhoff; Christian Vorstius; Ralph Radach Word difficulty determines the accuracy of regressive saccades in reading Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2026. @article{Friede2026,The current experiment was conducted to study effects of lexical word difficulty on the control of long-range regressive saccades. Participants read single line sentences in German for comprehension and checked for a spelling error that was inserted when the eyes had reached the end of the line. When words were more difficult in terms of orthographic irregularity and lower frequency, this dramatically increased the accuracy of regressions back to these words. If the target was missed, fewer additional saccades and less time were needed until the eyes fixated the target word. The data suggest that more effortful word processing is related to a better representation in visual–spatial memory, enabling more effective programming of regressions. |
Skadi Gerkensmeier; Christina Bolte; Jan‐Ole Radecke; Feline Hamami; Andreas Sprenger; Christoph Helmchen; Robert Chen; Marcus Callister; Talyta Cortez Grippe; Christine Klein; Norbert Brüggemann; Tobias Bäumer; Alexander Münchau; Anne Weissbach Convergence deficits in myoclonus‐dystonia point to cerebellar impairment Journal Article In: Movement Disorders Clinical Practice, pp. 1–8, 2026. @article{Gerkensmeier2026,Background Background: Myoclonus-dystonia (M-D) is a monogenic movement disorder, with proposed cerebellar dysfunction. Vergence eye movement deficits, characteristics of degenerative cerebellar disease, have not been studied in M-D. Cerebellar transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) is considered a potential therapeutic approach. Objectives: To assess vergence and prosaccade performance as markers of cerebellar dysfunction in M-D and Objectives to evaluate the effects of cerebellar 50 Hz tACS on these eye movements. Methods: Vergence and prosaccade performance were examined in 14 M-D patients carrying pathogenic SGCE Methods variants and 14 healthy controls. A subgroup (n = 7) received real and sham 50 Hz cerebellar tACS in a randomized, double-blind design. Results: M-D patients showed prolonged latency and reduced gain of convergence compared to controls. Results Divergence did not differ between groups. Prosaccade peak velocity was reduced in M-D patients. 50 Hz cerebellar tACS showed no effect on eye movements. Conclusion: Impaired convergence supports cerebellar involvement in M-D. Further studies should identify affected pathways. |
Christine Misketis; Hamed Tadayyoni; Paul C. Yielder; Bernadette Murphy Subclinical neck pain alters gaze stability during the vestibulo-ocular reflex Journal Article In: Applied Sciences, vol. 247, no. 16, pp. 1–21, 2026. @article{Misketis2026,(1) Background: Subclinical neck pain is mild-to-moderate neck pain that has not yet beentreated, and where individuals experience pain-free days. Alterations in sensorimotor integration, motor control, proprioception, and cerebellar inhibition have been observed in individuals with subclinical neck pain. Upregulation of the cervico-ocular reflex is documented in subclinical neck pain, with no difference in the gain of the vestibulo-ocular reflex. Vestibulo-ocular reflex gain adaptation and associated differences in visuo-motor control have not been successfully measured in this population. This study aims to investigate the vestibulo-ocular reflex gain adaptation and visuo-motor control in individuals with subclinical neck pain. (2) Methods: 30 right-hand-dominant participants (19 healthy controls: 10 male and 9 female; 16 subclinical neck pain: 6 male and 10 female) aged 18 to 35 performed an eye tracking task. Participants were seated 90cm away from a monitor and instructed to hold their gaze on a stationary or moving target projected onto a screen while performing active head rotations. Trials were divided into 12 blocks (pre-adaptation,10 adaptation, and post-adaptation) for a total of 192 trials. During adaptation, the target would move at increasing speeds during each block, increasing by 10% of active head velocity up to a maximum of 100%. (3) Results: The subclinical neck pain group demonstrated significantly higher total saccades (p = 0.006, η2 = 0.240) and overt catch-up saccades (p = 0.041, η2 = 0.141) than the healthy control group. (4) Conclusion: Subclinical neck pain alters the visual–vestibular interaction. |
Thomas Seacrist; Elizabeth A. Walshe; Shukai Cheng; Emily Brown; Charlotte Birnbaum; Victoria Kaufman; Flaura K. Winston; William C. Gaetz A novel paradigm for identifying eye-tracking metrics associated with cognitive control during driving through MEG neuroimaging Journal Article In: Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, vol. 116, pp. 1–13, 2026. @article{Seacrist2026,Understanding the neurocognitive underpinnings of driving behavior in adolescents is critical to improving road safety. To address this, we established a novel paradigm linking magnetoencephalography (MEG)-recorded frequency-specific brain activity to simulated driving performance, identifying periods of increased cognitive control. However, this initial paradigm did not incorporate eye-tracking – a potentially scalable proxy for cognitive control that could be leveraged by in-vehicle driver monitoring systems. This proof-of-concept study expands our paradigm by integrating eye-tracking to identify scanning behavior metrics associated with periods of increased cognitive control validated by MEG. Typically developing adolescents (n = 11; mean age = 15.1 ± 1.5 yrs) completed three driving tasks of varying cognitive demand, and MEG frequency specific analysis confirmed periods of high (Hi) and low (Lo) cognitive control via the established biomarker of frontal midline theta (FMT). Fixation count, fixation duration, horizontal/vertical mean gaze position, saccade amplitude, and horizontal/vertical spread of search were compared between Hi vs. Lo periods of cognitive control. Task-specific differences in fixation count (p < 0.05), mean gaze position (p < 0.01), saccade amplitude (p < 0.05), and spread of search (p < 0.01) were observed between Hi compared to Lo cognitive control periods. These differences corresponded to expected task-specific changes in scanning behavior that would accompany cognitive control over behavior, suggesting a signal that eye-tracking may serve as a proxy for underlying neurocognitive processes. This integrated approach demonstrates methodological rigor and offers a promising framework for further research and informing development of in-vehicle driver monitoring systems for detecting cognitive deficits in real time, with implications for enhancing teen driver safety. |
Waxun Su; Xiao Lin; Weijian Liu; Tak Kwan Lam; Peng Li; Qiandong Wang The impact of depression and social anxiety on eye orientation and disengagement in individuals with and without depression Journal Article In: Journal of Psychiatric Research, vol. 192, pp. 325–331, 2026. @article{Su2026,In individuals with depression, the comorbidity with social anxiety disorder is prevalent that often exacerbates symptoms and social dysfunction, such as exhibiting more severe social avoidance and interpersonal impairment. Our study used the eye-tracking technique to explore how depression and social anxiety, individually and in combination, influence orientation toward and disengagement from the eyes in individuals diagnosed with depression or not. Participants were 49 healthy individuals and 64 individuals with depression, whose gaze was initially guided to the eye or mouth region immediately before the onset of the face. Latency to disengage from the guided regions and latency to orient to the eyes following the onset of the face were measured. The findings revealed that, firstly, individuals showed delayed disengagement from the eyes compared to the mouth regardless of depression diagnosis or social anxiety level. Secondly, in healthy individuals, increased social anxiety was related to quick eye orientation. Thirdly, in individuals with depression, longer disengagement latencies from the eyes were associated with higher levels of depression or social anxiety, but only when one of the scores was high, not medium or low. These findings highlight the importance of understanding the distinct and combined impacts of depression and social anxiety on clinical and nonclinical individuals, informing more targeted clinical interventions and assessment strategies. |
Xuefei Yu; Atul Gopal; Ken-ichi Inoue; Martin O. Bohlen; Genevieve M. Kuczewski; Marc A. Sommer; Hendrikje Nienborg; Masahiko Takada; Okihide Hikosaka Retrograde optogenetics reveals sensorimotor convergence within a corticotectal pathway of non-human primates Journal Article In: Current Biology, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 236–242, 2026. @article{Yu2026,Understanding how the cerebral cortex communicates with subcortical areas to drive behavior remains a central question in system neuroscience. One key unresolved issue is whether prefrontal cortical outputs to motor-related subcortical regions carry predominantly motor commands1 or mixed sensory-motor signals.2,3 Retrograde optogenetics offers a powerful way to interrogate such projection-defined circuits,4–7 but its use in non-human primates has been limited.8–11 Here, we applied retrograde optogenetics in awake macaques to directly test the functional organization of the corticotectal projection from the frontal eye field (FEF) to the superior colliculus (SC). We asked whether the FEF output signals to SC are motor-dominant or broadly sensory-motor. Optical activation of this pathway evoked robust, contralateral saccades and selectively modulated reaction times, demonstrating its causal role in saccade generation. Optogenetically tagging FEF neurons pro- jecting to SC revealed a heterogeneous population of visual, visuomotor, and motor neurons. This diverse output converged predominantly onto motor-related neurons in the SC. These findings support a visuomotor convergence model, in which diverse FEF outputs drive motor-selective SC neurons with activity sufficient for saccade generation, and thus resolve long-standing questions over the composition of FEF outputs. Additionally, our results establish retrograde optogenetics as a tool for dissecting projection-defined circuits in primates and for precisely probing the neural pathways that link perception to action. |
Han Zhang; John Jonides PupEyes: An interactive Python library for eye movement data processing Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 1–25, 2026. @article{Zhang2026,We present PupEyes, an open-source Python package for preprocessing and visualizing pupil size and fixation data. PupEyes supports data collected from EyeLink and Tobii eye-trackers as well as any generic dataset that conforms to minimal formatting standards. Developed with current best practices, PupEyes provides a comprehensive pupil preprocessing pipeline and interactive tools for data exploration and diagnosis. In addition to pupil size data, PupEyes provides interactive tools for visualizing fixation data, drawing areas of interest (AOIs), and computing AOI-based metrics. PupEyes uses the pandas data structure and can work seamlessly with other data analysis packages within the Python ecosystem. Overall, PupEyes (1) ensures that pupil size data are preprocessed in a principled, transparent, and reproducible manner, (2) helps researchers better understand their data through interactive visualizations, and (3) enables flexible extensions for further analysis tailored to specific research goals. To ensure computational reproducibility, we provide detailed, executable tutorials ( https://pupeyes.readthedocs.io/ ) that allow users to reproduce and modify the code examples in a virtual environment. |
Frances G. Cooley; Karen Emmorey; Emily Saunders; Elizabeth R. Schotter In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 1–14, 2026. @article{Cooley2026,Eye-tracking corpora have advanced our understanding of reading processes by providing large-scale datasets of naturalistic reading behavior. However, existing corpora have almost exclusively sampled from typically hearing readers of spoken languages. Here, we present the Signers' Eye-movements in English Reading (SEER) Corpus, a dataset of eye-movement behaviors from 41 skilled deaf adult readers who are early signers of American Sign Language (ASL), as well as a comparative group of 101 typically hearing monolingual English readers. Participants read 200 English sentences presented one at a time. In addition to eye-tracking data, the corpus includes detailed participant information: a standardized measure of reading proficiency, spelling recognition, and nonverbal intelligence for all participants. Information for the deaf participants include ASL comprehension scores, age of ASL acquisition, and phonological awareness scores (for a subset of participants). We report comparative analyses of reading behaviors at both the word level and sentence level. We also examine group differences in the effects of word length, frequency, and surprisal on local measures. The results indicate stronger effects of length and surprisal, but equivalent frequency effects (on content words) for deaf compared to hearing readers. The SEER Corpus offers researchers the opportunity to test hypotheses about reading development and efficiency in bimodal bilinguals who are first language users of ASL and skilled readers of English, supporting broader investigations of visual language processing. The corpus is preregistered and publicly available (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/7P4F2) to facilitate replication, cross-study comparisons, and exploration of preliminary hypotheses in this understudied population. |
Gabrielle F. Freitag; Shannon Shaughnessy; Jennifer M. Meigs; Parmis Khosravi; Julia O. Linke; Spencer C. Evans; Ellen Leibenluft; Melissa A. Brotman; Daniel S. Pine; Katharina Kircanski; Elise M. Cardinale An investigation of inhibitory control as a mechanism differentiating tonic and phasic irritability Journal Article In: Child Psychiatry & Human Development, pp. 1–11, 2026. @article{Freitag2026,Phasic and tonic irritability are highly correlated clinical constructs yet differentially associated with developmental trajectories and treatment response. However, limited research has identified their shared and unique underlying behavioral mechanisms. In a sample of youths enriched for irritability (N = 141, age range 7–18, age M[SD] = 12.60[2.54], 48.23% female), we investigated whether inhibitory control is differentially associated with phasic versus tonic irritability. Repli- cating prior work, tonic and phasic irritability were estimated via independent confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) using items and/or subscales from multi-informant questionnaires. A latent factor of inhibitory control was extracted from four behavioral tasks. Initial multiple linear regression analysis found that phasic, not tonic, irritability was significantly associ- ated with impaired inhibitory control. However, results were no longer significant after accounting for shared associations with age. In addition, when adding commonly co-occurring symptoms such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms and oppositionality, age and ADHD were significant predictors of inhibitory control, but phasic irri- tability was not. Results suggest that inhibitory control alone may not be a salient mechanism for disambiguating phasic and tonic irritability. Future work leveraging longitudinal methods and consideration of other potential contextual factors is needed. |
Yang Wang; Lei Zhang; Jon D. Elhai; Christian Montag; Haibo Yang The interacting role of fear of missing out in attentional bias dynamics during problematic social media use Journal Article In: Addictive Behaviors, vol. 173, no. 393, pp. 1–8, 2026. @article{Wang2026,Problematic social media use (PSMU) is increasingly conceptualized as a behavioral addiction involving attentional bias toward social media icons. Although fear of missing out (FoMO) contributes to PSMU maintenance, its dynamic interactive role in attentional bias dynamics remains unclear. Guided by the I-PACE model and attentional bias theory, this study examined whether and when FoMO modulates gaze-based attentional bias toward social media icons in PSMU. 912 university students completed online screening for PSMU and FoMO; 55 meeting PSMU criteria (Mage = 19.60) were categorized into high- or low-FoMO groups. Participants performed a visual dot-probe task with social/non-social app icons while eye-tracking recorded gaze behavior across four 500 ms time windows. Results revealed FoMO significantly interacted with attentional bias in two critical phases: During early processing (0–500 ms), the PSMU/high-FoMO group exhibited attentional orienting deceleration to social media icons, whereas PSMU/low-FoMO showed attentional maintenance. In later processing (1000–1500 ms), PSMU/high-FoMO demonstrated attentional vigilance-maintenance, while PSMU/low-FoMO displayed avoidance. These findings indicate FoMO exerts a temporally dynamic interaction effect on attentional bias in PSMU—characterized by initial orienting delays followed by sustained attentional engagement with social media icons. This supports reconceptualizing FoMO as a core psychological mechanism that reinforces PSMU through biased attentional dynamics, advancing theoretical alignment with the I-PACE framework. |
Huan Zhang; Keyin Chen; Pengfei Xu; Xin Zhao Impact of emotional working memory training on threat-related attentional bias in social anxiety: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: Journal of Affective Disorders, vol. 393, pp. 1–11, 2026. @article{Zhang2026a,Threat-related attentional bias is a core characteristic of social anxiety and is closely associated with impaired attentional control. While traditional working memory training (WM-T) improves cognitive control and emotional regulation, it does not address emotional information processing. Emotional working memory training (EWM-T), which integrates negative emotional stimuli, may enhance control over negative information. This study hypothesizes that EWM-T can reduce threat-related attentional bias in socially anxious individuals and outperform WM-T in decreasing sustained attention to negative stimuli. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of EWM-T. Experiment 1 employed a dot-probe task and eye-tracking to examine threat-related attentional bias in high and low social anxiety groups. Experiment 2 compared EWM-T with WM-T in a randomized controlled trial, in which participants with high social anxiety completed 20 training sessions over 30 days. Transfer effects were evaluated pre- and post-training using the Stroop task, number-switching task, digit-span task, and active memory task. In Experiment 1, individuals with high social anxiety exhibited greater attentional vigilance and faster detection of threat stimuli. In Experiment 2, both groups showed reductions in anxiety symptoms and practice-related improvements on several cognitive tasks, with no Group × Time interactions. Post-training eye-tracking data revealed a decrease in fixation bias toward threat stimuli, indicating improved attentional control. These findings suggest that EWM-T enhances attentional orientation and alleviates anxiety symptoms in social anxiety, with stronger transfer effects compared to WM-T. Incorporating emotional content into working memory training offers advantages for clinical interventions in social anxiety. |
2025 |
Domenica Abad-Malo; Omar Alvarado-Cando; Hakan Karsilar The role of spontaneous eye blinks in temporal perception: An eye tracking study Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 18, no. 6, pp. 1–10, 2025. @article{AbadMalo2025,Our interaction with the world depends on our ability to process temporal information, which is a key component of human cognition that directly impacts decision-making, planning, and prediction of events. Visual information plays a crucial role in shaping our subjective perception of time, and even brief interruptions, such as those caused by eye blinks, can disrupt the continuity of our perception and alter how we estimate durations. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between spontaneous eye blinks and time perception using a temporal bisection task. In particular, we focus on how blinks preceding stimulus presentation impact the perceived duration of that stimulus. The results of fitting a generalized linear mixed-effects model revealed that blinking can indeed influence the duration estimation. Specifically, the presence of a single blink before the stimulus presentation had a significant effect on subjective time perception; participants were more likely to categorize a duration as shorter compared to when they did not blink. In contrast, two or more blinks before stimulus presentation did not have a significant effect compared to not blinking. This study further elucidates the complex interaction between the momentary suppression of visual input and the perception of time. |
Ali Batikh; Éric Koun; Roméo Salemme; Alessandro Farnè; Denis Pélisson The effect of spatial attention on saccadic adaptation Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 25, no. 14, pp. 1–26, 2025. @article{Batikh2025a,Eye movements and spatial attention are both crucial to visual perception. Orienting gaze to objects of interest is achieved by voluntary saccades (VSs) driven by internal goals or reactive saccades (RSs) triggered automatically by sudden environmental changes. Both VSs and RSs are known to undergo plastic adjustments to maintain their accuracy throughout life, driven by saccadic adaptation processes. Spatial attention enhances visual processing within a restricted zone, and it can be shifted voluntarily following our internal goals (endogenous) or automatically in response to unexpected changes in sensory stimulation (exogenous). Despite the widely accepted notion that saccadic and attention shifts are governed by distinct but highly interconnected systems, the relationship between saccadic adaptation and spatial attention is still unclear. To address this relationship, we conducted two experiments combining modified versions of the double-step adaptation paradigm and the attention-orienting paradigm. Experiment 1 tested the effect of shifting exogenous attention by a tactile cue near or away from the saccade's target on RS adaptation. Experiment 2 also used tactile cueing but now to investigate the effect of shifting endogenous attention on VS adaptation. Although we were unable to obtain direct evidence for an effect of spatial attention on saccadic adaptation, correlation analyses indicated that both the rate and magnitude of saccadic adaptation were positively correlated with the allocation of attention toward the saccade target and negatively correlated with attention directed away from the target. Introduction |
Cemre Baykan; Alexander C. Schütz Eye movements do not preferentially test inferences in the blind spot Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2025. @article{Baykan2025a,Humans make eye movements to regions of high uncertainty to maximize the information gain in their visual search. Along with veridical sensory information, there is also perceptually inferred information that arises at the gaps caused by anatomical or environmental factors. It is unclear how those inferences are treated in comparison to veridical information during search behavior. Here, in two experiments, we tested if eye movements are preferentially directed towards the blind spot as an area of high uncertainty and high information gain in a monocular visual search task. The results show that the first saccade was not directed primarily to the blind spot when “invisible” targets in the left and right blind spot occured interleaved. Only when viewing conditions were blocked, such that “invisible” targets occured always in the same blind spot side, participants learned to look preferentially at the blind spot. These results show that perceptual inferences in the blind spot are not preferentially tested by eye movements in general, but that they can be optimized by using contextual information. |
Shailendra Bhandari; Pedro Lencastre; Rujeena Mathema; Alexander Szorkovszky; Anis Yazidi; Pedro G. Lind Modeling eye gaze velocity trajectories using GANs with spectral loss for enhanced fidelity Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2025. @article{Bhandari2025,Accurate modeling of eye gaze dynamics is essential for advancement in human-computer interaction, neurological diagnostics, and cognitive research. Traditional generative models like Markov models often fail to capture the complex temporal dependencies and distributional nuance inherent in eye gaze trajectories data. This study introduces a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework employing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) generators and discriminators to generate high-fidelity synthetic eye gaze velocity trajectories. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of four GAN architectures: CNN-CNN, LSTM-CNN, CNN-LSTM, and LSTM-LSTM–trained under two conditions: using only adversarial loss () and using a weighted combination of adversarial and spectral losses. Our findings reveal that the LSTM-CNN architecture trained with this new loss function exhibits the closest alignment to the real data distribution, effectively capturing both the distribution tails and the intricate temporal dependencies. The inclusion of spectral regularization significantly enhances the GANs' ability to replicate the spectral characteristics of eye gaze movements, leading to a more stable learning process and improved data fidelity. Comparative analysis with a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) optimized to four hidden states further highlights the advantages of the LSTM-CNN GAN. Statistical metrics show that the HMM-generated data significantly diverges from the real data in terms of mean, standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis. In contrast, the LSTM-CNN model closely matches the real data across these statistics, affirming its capacity to model the complexity of eye gaze dynamics effectively. These results position the spectrally regularized LSTM-CNN GAN as a robust tool for generating synthetic eye gaze velocity data with high fidelity. Its ability to accurately replicate both the distributional and temporal properties of real data holds significant potential for applications in simulation environments, training systems, and the development of advanced eye-tracking technologies, ultimately contributing to more naturalistic and responsive human-computer interactions. |
Baptiste Caziot; Frank Bremmer Dissociate triggering of conjunctive and disjunctive eye movements Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–14, 2025. @article{Caziot2025,In natural behavior, our eyes must coordinate two types of movements when looking between points in space: conjunctive movements (where both eyes move together) and disjunctive movements (where the eyes move in opposite direction to change their convergence angle). Here we investigate how the initiation of these 2 different types of eye-movements is coordinated. We used the Size-Latency effect to modulate saccadic latencies. To elicit combined saccadic and vergence eye-movements, we displayed large ring targets at different vertical offsets and disparities relative to fixation. This allowed us to easily dissociate version and vergence eye-movements. We found that saccadic latencies were strongly modulated by the eccentricity of the targets as well as their hemifield, but not by the disparity of the targets. The opposite was true for vergence: vergence latencies were modulated by the disparity sign and amplitude of the targets, but not by their eccentricity or hemifield. We found a complete lack of correlation between saccadic and vergence latencies, both across and within conditions. Finally, we found that distributions of vergence latencies have a markedly reduced skewness as compared to distributions of saccadic latencies, a hallmark of evidence accumulation. Overall, our results demonstrate that the initiation mechanisms for these two types of eye-movements operate independently. |
Jiří Čeněk; Daniela Halámková; Jan Caha; David Lacko; Petra Kalenská; Zdeněk Stachoň; Jie Li Tsai; Albert Ahenkan; Thomas Dresler; Jana Lüdtke; Nicol Dostálová; Alžběta Šašinková; Pavel Ugwitz; Čeněk Šašinka Cross-cultural analysis of eye-movement patterns in visual scene perception: A comparison of seven cultural samples Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–14, 2025. @article{Cenek2025,This eye-tracking research investigates cross-cultural similarities and differences in visual attention in complex scenes free-viewing perception. The study utilizes 70 real-world photos with one or two focal objects as stimulus materials. The study examines the amount of time spent on focal objects, saccadic lengths, temporal changes in saccadic lengths and factors that influence these metrics. Data were collected between 2020 and 2022 from seven cultural samples in Africa, East Asia, Europe, and the Near East (N = 408). Contrary to initial hypotheses, the findings challenge the expected order of countries in terms of attention toward objects. Participants from Taiwan, assumed to exhibit holistic patterns, displayed the most holistic viewing pattern. Surprisingly, participants from Germany and Czechia did not significantly differ from those in Taiwan. Furthermore, participants from Ghana and Türkiye, expected to be moderate, showed the most analytic pattern. This challenges preconceived notions and contributes to understanding patterns of scene perception in underrepresented countries. Additional analyses explored the relationship between number and size of focal objects and dwell time, as well as the potential influence of sociodemographic variables, on dwell time. |
Seah Chang; Julie D. Golomb From the eye to the world: Spatial suppression is primarily coded in retinotopic coordinates but can be learned in spatiotopic coordinates Journal Article In: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 3009–3024, 2025. @article{Chang2025c,Attention is multifaceted, with evidence for distinct mechanisms of attentional facilitation and suppression processes. Interestingly, much less is known about the spatial coordinate system of suppression compared to that of facilitation. The present study examined the coordinate system of spatial suppression by manipulating gaze position and distractor regularities, asking whether suppression is coded in retinotopic (eye-centered) and/or spatiotopic (world-centered) coordinates, and if this varies with more ecological and dynamic contexts. In the current study, we demonstrate that learned spatial suppression primarily transfers across gaze position in retinotopic coordinates; however, in more dynamic contexts favoring spatiotopic information, spatial suppression can be learned in spatiotopic coordinates. These results suggest that the default coordinate system of spatial suppression is retinotopic under static contexts, but suppression can be rapidly learned in spatiotopic coordinates when a spatiotopic representation is beneficial in more naturalistic dynamic contexts. |
Mingjing Chen; Li Chih Wang; Sisi Liu; Duo Liu The role of format familiarity and semantic transparency in Chinese reading: Evidence from eye movements Journal Article In: BMC Psychology, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Chen2025h,Unlike alphabetic language, Chinese is an ideographic language that does not contain spaces between words. Chinese readers must develop unique segmentation strategies for word recognition and reading comprehension. This study explored the role of format familiarity and semantic transparency in Chinese reading, reflecting the segmentation strategy and word processing characteristics in Chinese reading. Forty undergraduates read Chinese in familiar and unfamiliar formats, segmenting target words into semantically transparent and semantically opaque words. We used Eye Link 1000 to measure readers' eye movement index, which can reflect processing characteristics of word recognition in Chinese reading. The following findings were made: (1) Familiarity with the text format affects Chinese reading performance. The fixation time in the familiar direction is short, the skipping rate is high, and the processing efficiency is higher when the fixation point is close to the word center; (2) Semantic transparency affects the segmentation strategy and word processing in Chinese reading. Chinese readers have shorter fixation times, higher reading efficiency, and a fixation point closer to the word center when reading semantically transparent words. It supported the combined access model. (3) There is significant interaction in the early eye movement indicators, representing word processing characteristics in the early stage of Chinese reading. Specifically, the semantic-transparency effect appeared under a familiar rather than an unfamiliar format. The format familiarity effect was found in the early processing indexes of transparent words rather than opaque words. In the familiar format, since the meaning of the morpheme and the whole word of transparent words is consistent, readers tend to segment and process them as whole words. Due to the lack of reading experience, the reading difficulty increases in the unfamiliar format. To reduce the difficulty and promote comprehension, readers change their segmentation strategy and tend to segment transparent words by character. The word segmentation process slowed, and the format-familiarity effect did not show in the early indexes under unfamiliar format. More importantly, the separability of the lexical processing stages showed in the interaction of different indexes, which means that word segmentation and lexical recognition in Chinese reading may not be completely synchronized, supporting the Chinese E-Z reader model. |
Zhaobin Chen; Yangpan Ou; Yudan Ding; Ying Wang; Huabing Li; Feng Liu; Ping Li; Dongsheng Lv; Yong Liu; Bing Lang; Jingping Zhao; Wenbin Guo In: Schizophrenia, vol. 11, no. 1, 2025. @article{Chen2025p,Clinical high-risk (CHR) is a prodromal period before psychosis characterized by attenuated, transient, or intermittent psychotic symptoms and declining functioning. They exhibit eye movement abnormalities and brain functional damage compared with schizophrenia, potentially increasing vulnerability to psychosis. This study investigates eye movement dysfunction and brain activity alterations in CHR and first-episode schizophrenia (FSZ) individuals to identify early biomarkers for psychosis progression. Twenty-seven drug-naïve FSZ, 25 CHR, and 28 healthy controls (HCs) were recruited for eye-tracking tasks and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to evaluate eye movement and regional homogeneity (ReHo) differences. Machine-learning algorithms were used to differentiate FSZ from CHR. In combination with the Allen Human Brain Atlas (AHBA), transcriptome-neuroimaging analysis was applied to identify ReHo-related gene expression profiles. FSZ exhibited a wide range of eye movement abnormalities across multiple tasks, while certain abnormalities were already present in CHR. Abnormal ReHo alterations were found in orbitofrontal gyrus, temporal gyrus, and cingulum among three groups, associated with specific eye movement parameters. These differences in eye movement and ReHo allowed for high-accuracy discrimination between them. Genetic analysis identified significant genes in FSZ and CHR, enriched in various biological functions and pathways (all corrected p < 0.05). FSZ and CHR exhibited different eye movement and ReHo patterns, indicating potential as early biomarkers. Our findings reveal correlations between these ReHo patterns and gene expression profiles using AHBA database, shedding light on possible genetic mechanisms underlying brain function in FSZ and CHR. |
Tzu-Yao Chiu; Isabel Jaen; Julie D. Golomb Spatiotemporal predictability of saccades modulates postsaccadic feature interference Journal Article In: Journal of vision, vol. 25, no. 14, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Chiu2025a,Spatial attention and eye movements jointly contribute to efficient sampling of visual information in the environment, but maintaining precise spatial attention across saccades becomes challenging due to the drastic retinal shifts. Previous studies have provided evidence that spatial attention may remap imperfectly across saccades, incurring systematic feature inference with ongoing perception, yet the role of saccade predictability remains largely untested. In the current study, we investigated whether spatiotemporal predictability of saccades influences postsaccadic remapping and feature perception. In two preregistered experiments, we implemented the postsaccadic feature report paradigm and manipulated spatiotemporal predictability of saccades. Experiment 1 manipulated spatial and temporal saccade predictability together, whereas Experiment 2 dissociated the roles of spatial and temporal predictability in separate conditions. In addition to spatial and temporal saccade predictability both improving general task performance, we found that spatial saccade predictability specifically modulated postsaccadic feature interference. When saccades were spatially unpredictable, "swap errors" occurred at the early postsaccadic time point, where participants misreported the retinotopic color instead of the spatiotopic target color. However, the swapping errors were reduced when saccades were made spatially predictable. These results suggest that systematic feature interference associated with postsaccadic remapping is malleable to expectations of the upcoming saccade target location, highlighting the role of predictions in maintaining perceptual stability across saccades. |
M. J. Boer; R. A. Wasmann; J. W. R. Pott; F. W. Cornelissen; N. M. Jansonius Continuous visual stimulus tracking to quantify eye motility in spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neurology, vol. 16, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Boer2025,Introduction: Spinocerebellar ataxias (SCA) form a group of dominantly inherited neurodegenerative diseases represented by progressive cerebellar ataxia and various other neurological deficits. SCA3 is the most prevalent type globally and represents 28% of the autosomal dominant cerebellar ataxias in The Netherlands. The associated oculomotor disorders, with distance esotropia as its hallmark, cause diplopia and often present early. To gain further insight into this, we examined eye movements made during a continuous visual stimulus tracking task (SONDA; Standardized Oculomotor and Neuro-Ophthalmic Disorder Assessment). Methods: Thirteen genetically confirmed SCA3 cases underwent SONDA, both monocularly and binocularly. As a reference, we used previously collected data from 36 monocularly and 13 binocularly measured healthy subjects. Results: SCA3 cases were well capable of tracking the moving stimulus, but they performed the task differently. More specifically, their eyes were not synchronized in their movements, and they made multiple small saccades in response to a large stimulus jump instead of a larger saccade followed by a small corrective saccade. The saccadic amplitude distribution shape was related to the severity of the oculomotor disorder, suggesting that the saccadic amplitude distribution could be used as a biomarker of disease severity. Conclusion: Overall, this study highlights that eye-tracking during a standardized task can give valuable insights into how eye movements are affected in SCA3 and provides suggestions for potential biomarkers for severity and the associated treatment options. Longitudinal research is needed to elaborate on these findings and validate the proposed biomarkers. |
Thibault J. Desbordes; Nadia Alahyane; Alain Guillaume Task-relevant information availability shapes eye movements and perceptual judgment confidence Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Desbordes2025,Humans continuously decide where to look to gather task-relevant information. While affective rewards such as money are known to bias gaze direction, it remains unclear whether non-affective informational value can similarly shape oculomotor decisions. Here, we modulated the availability of task-relevant visual information at saccade targets by probabilistically varying its presentation duration, in a perceptual judgment task performed by human participants. Results showed that participants developed implicit biases, increasingly avoiding an experimentally introduced low-information region. These learned preferences were associated with longer saccade latencies toward non-preferred regions, similar to patterns observed with affective reward learning. However, saccade peak velocity remained unchanged across locations. Perceptual accuracy was not influenced either. When participants' confidence ratings reliably distinguished correct from incorrect responses, confidence was higher for preferred regions, suggesting a dissociation between perceptual and metacognitive performance. These findings demonstrate that the probability of accessing easily usable information can be implicitly learned to guide eye movement decisions, much like reward. Moreover, subjective confidence can be linked to learned preferences, without modulation of perceptual performance. Our results highlight that informational value, independent of affective cues, shapes oculomotor decision-making and post-perceptual judgment confidence. |
Léa Entzmann; Árni Kristjánsson; Árni Gunnar Ásgeirsson Saccade endpoints reflect attentional templates in visual search: Evidence from feature distribution learning Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 25, no. 14, pp. 1–19, 2025. @article{Entzmann2025a,In visual search, our gaze is guided by mental representations of stimulus features, known as attentional templates. These templates are thought to be probabilistic, shaped by environmental regularities. For example, participants can learn to distinguish between the shapes of different distractor color distributions in visual search. The present study assessed whether such subtle differences in distractor color distributions (Gaussian vs. uniform) are reflected in saccade endpoints. We conducted two experiments, each consisting of learning trials, designed to prime a specific distractor color distribution, and test trials, where target color varied in its distance from the mean of previously presented distractor distributions. Saccade endpoint deviations were observed through the global effect, where the saccades tended to land between two nearby stimuli. The experiments differed in difficulty, with test trials in Experiment 2 involving more distractors and colors. During test trials, reaction times and saccade endpoints were affected by target distance from the mean of the preceding distractor distribution. The farther the target color was from this mean, the less the saccade deviated from the target and the lower the reaction times. However, saccade endpoints did not reflect the shape of distractor color distributions, an effect that was observed only on reaction times in Experiment 2. Overall, color priming affects both reaction times and saccade deviations, but distractor feature distribution learning depends on search difficulty and response measures, with saccade endpoints less sensitive to subtle differences in the shape of color distributions. |
Rania Ezzo; Bogeng Song; Bas Rokers; Marisa Carrasco Eyes on hold: Motion task difficulty jointly delays microsaccade and pupil responses Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Ezzo2025,Microsaccades and pupil dynamics exhibit canonical temporal profiles, providing insights into perceptual and cognitive processes. Microsaccades are typically suppressed with respect to expected stimulus onset and followed by a rebound to baseline rates. Here, we investigated whether and how the temporal dynamics of microsaccades and pupil dilation vary with task difficulty for a motion perception task. We hypothesized that difficulty jointly delays the rebound of microsaccade rates and the time of peak pupil dilation when discriminating motion direction. Human observers discriminated motion direction (clockwise or counterclockwise) in a briefly presented perifoveal drifting stimulus, which varied according to two ‘easy' vs ‘hard' difficulty manipulations –cardinal vs oblique motion directions, and large vs small tilt offsets from the discriminated direction. We found that (1) increased task difficulty strengthened and prolonged microsaccade inhibition resulting in delayed rebounds, (2) peak pupillary responses were both larger in amplitude and delayed for more difficult conditions, (3) discrimination response time correlated with microsaccade rebounds and peak pupillary responses. We conclude that the delays in these microsaccade rebound and pupil responses are due to a prolonged period of sensory evidence accumulation, and that their correlated temporal dynamics support a shared neural mechanism underlying both pupil and microsaccade responses. |
Madison Fenner; Brian Szekely; Kristen G. Quigley; Philip Pavilionis; Nicholas G. Murray Oculomotor dysfunction May not subside upon clinical resolution of sport related concussion Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, 2025. @article{Fenner2025,Sport-related concussion (SRC) is a public health crisis that results in growing diagnoses each year. Recent evidence suggests that there are oculomotor deficits present in patients with SRC. It is unclear if this oculomotor deficit is linked to other clinical outcomes or lingers beyond clinical symptom resolution. The purpose of this study is to investigate the progression of oculomotor and clinical deficits following SRC at the acute stage of injury and again when they are clinically considered fully symptom-free for at least 24 h. 13 NCAA athletes completed a multifaceted concussion battery that included postural (tandem gait), symptom provocation (Vestibular/Ocular Motor Screening), and oculomotor assessments (eye-tracking) once within 48 h of diagnosis of SRC (AC) and again once free of symptoms (SF). Significant group differences were observed in several oculomotor metrics. Both AC and SF groups exhibited elevated peak saccadic velocity and acceleration compared to controls (p < 0.01), with no significant difference between AC and SF. Saccadic amplitude was significantly reduced in both AC and SF groups relative to controls (p < 0.001). The number of masked saccades during SP was lower in the AC group than in controls (p = 0.05), but this difference was not observed in the SF group. No significant group differences were found for saccade duration or SP velocity. There are still oculomotor deficits that persist when SRC student-athlete patients' injuries are deemed clinically resolved. Lingering issues are not uncommon; however, these functional eye movement deficits are concerning and warrant additional research. |
Marius Grandjean; Louise Kauffmann; Alexia Roux-Sibilon; Valérie Goffaux Does radial bias contribute to fast saccades toward faces in the periphery? Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 25, no. 14, pp. 1–22, 2025. @article{Grandjean2025,Saccadic choice studies have shown that humans initiate faster saccades toward faces than other visual categories. Here, we tested whether the saccadic advantage for faces observed in past studies is partly due to stimuli being typically presented along the horizontal meridian (HM). Our previous work suggests that the radial bias along the HM facilitates access to the horizontal structure of faces, which optimally drives human face-specialized processing. We expected to corroborate the saccadic advantage for faces along the HM, where the radial bias facilitates access to horizontal content, and to observe a reduction of this advantage along the vertical meridian (VM), especially in participants showing a strong horizontal tuning for face recognition. Fifty participants performed a saccadic choice task targeting faces or vehicles presented at 15° eccentricity along the HM and VM. We also assessed the strength of the radial bias and the horizontal tuning for face identity recognition in each individual. As expected, saccades were faster and more accurate toward faces than vehicles; they were also faster along the HM than the VM. Contrary to our hypothesis, the saccadic face advantage did not differ between meridians, suggesting the robustness of face saccadic advantage. However, the saccadic face advantage along the VM correlated with the strength of the horizontal tuning of face identity recognition. Additionally, the radial bias predicted saccade latency toward faces along the HM. These findings indicate that low-level radial biases and high-level face-specialized mechanisms independently contribute to distinct functional aspects of the ultra-fast saccadic responses toward faces. |
Whitney S. Griggs; Sumner L. Norman; Mickael Tanter; Charles Liu; Vasileios Christopoulos; Mikhail G. Shapiro; Richard A. Andersen Functional ultrasound neuroimaging reveals mesoscopic organization of saccades in the lateral intraparietal area Journal Article In: Nature Communications, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 1–19, 2025. @article{Griggs2025,The lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP), contained within the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), is crucial for transforming spatial information into saccadic eye movements, yet its functional organization for movement direction remains unclear. Here, we used functional ultrasound imaging (fUSI), a technique with high sensitivity, large spatial coverage, and good spatial resolution, to map movement direction encoding across the PPC by recording local changes in cerebral blood volume within PPC as two male monkeys performed memory-guided saccades. Our analysis revealed a heterogeneous organization where small patches of neighboring LIP cortex encoded different directions. These subregions demonstrated consistent tuning across several months to years. A rough topography emerged where anterior LIP represented more contralateral downward movements and posterior LIP represented more contralateral upward movements. These results address two fundamental gaps in our understanding of LIP's functional organization: the neighborhood organization of patches and the stability of these populations across long periods of time. By tracking LIP populations over extended periods, we developed mesoscopic maps of direction specificity previously unattainable with fMRI or electrophysiology methods. |
Akram Jamali; Tourandokht Baluchnejadmojarad; Hajar Mehdizadeh; Seyede Zohreh Jazaeri; Soheila Fallah; Ghorban Taghizadeh Impact of post stroke fatigue on saccadic eye movement control and learning through inflammatory mechanisms Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Jamali2025,This study aimed to (1) examine the impact of post-stroke fatigue (PSF) on saccadic control, (2) assess the effect of PSF on saccade adaptation, and (3) explore the correlation between serum levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6) and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) with saccade control and adaptation in chronic stroke survivors. Fatigue was assessed in stroke survivors with high fatigue (HF-stroke |
Oren Kadosh; Benjamin Menashe; Yael Gera; Michal Ben-Shachar; Yoram S. Bonneh Oculomotor chronometry of spoken word structure processing Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–9, 2025. @article{Kadosh2025,Oculomotor inhibition (OMI) is the momentary inhibition of involuntary eye movements, such as saccades and blinks, following sensory stimulation. Higher-level cognitive processes, such as processing the structure of written words, have been shown to affect the duration and magnitude of the OMI. In this study we tested whether OMI measures are influenced by the processing of spoken word structures. Participants listened to Hebrew words and pseudowords presented auditorily while we recorded their microsaccades, eye blinks, and pupil dilation. Spoken pseudowords were divided into two groups based on their underlying linguistic structure, with one half containing real roots and the other half containing invented roots. Results show a greater OMI for Real-root pseudowords as compared to Invented-root pseudowords, replicating the morpheme interference effect found previously for written stimuli. OMI measures, including microsaccade and eye blink latencies, as well as pupil dilation peak latency, were consistently greater for real-root pseudowords compared to invented-root pseudowords. These findings demonstrate the sensitivity of OMI to the cognitive processing of spoken word structure, even in the absence of visual stimuli or visually directed task. The results highlight the potential role of oculomotor responses as a marker of higher-order linguistic processing. |
Srijita Karmakar; Miguel P. Eckstein The psychophysics of dynamic gaze-following saccades during search Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 25, no. 14, pp. 1–33, 2025. @article{Karmakar2025,The ability to quickly and precisely follow another person's gaze reflects critical evolutionary mechanisms underlying social interactions, such as attention modulation and the prediction of others' future actions. Recent studies show that observers use another person's gaze direction and peripheral scene information to make anticipatory saccades toward the gaze goal. However, it remains unclear how these eye movements are influenced by complex features of natural scenes, such as a foveal gazer, multiple peripheral gaze goals, and the relative distance between gazer and goal. We presented dynamic stimuli (videos) of real-world scenes with or without a gazer shifting their head to gaze at other individuals (gaze goals). Participants were instructed to search for a specific target individual in the videos while their eye movements were recorded. We measured the accuracy of the first saccade in locating the gaze goal. First, we found that the absence of a foveal gazer significantly increased saccade error, but only when the goal was at least approximately 9 degrees of visual angle from the initial fixation. First saccade amplitude and onset latency were higher in the gazer-present condition. Second, when there were multiple potential gaze goals in the periphery, the first saccade was directed to the individual closer to the initial fixation (gazer) location. Finally, the presence of multiple peripheral gaze goals shortened saccade latencies and increased the frequency of anticipatory saccades made before the gazer completed their head movement. These findings extend our understanding of gaze following in complex, naturalistic scenes and inform theories of attention and real-world decision-making. |
Yuna Kwak; Nina M. Hanning; Marisa Carrasco Saccade direction modulates the temporal dynamics of presaccadic attention Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 25, no. 14, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Kwak2025,Presaccadic attention enhances visual perception at the upcoming saccade target location. While this enhancement is often described as obligatory and temporally stereotyped, recent studies indicate that its strength varies depending on saccade direction. Here, we investigated whether the time course of presaccadic attention also differs across saccade directions. Participants performed a two-alternative forced-choice orientation discrimination task during saccade preparation. Tilt angles were individually titrated in a fixation baseline condition to equate task difficulty across the upper and lower vertical meridians. Sensitivity was then assessed at different time points relative to saccade onset and cue onset, allowing us to characterize the temporal dynamics of attentional enhancement. We found that presaccadic attention built up faster and reached higher levels preceding downward than upward saccades. Linear model fits revealed significant slope differences but no differences in intercepts, suggesting that the observed asymmetries reflect differences in attentional deployment during saccade preparation rather than preexisting differences in sensitivity. Saccade parameters did not account for these asymmetries. Our findings demonstrate that the temporal dynamics of presaccadic attention vary with saccade direction, which may be a potential mechanism underlying previously observed differences in presaccadic benefit at the upper and lower vertical meridians. This temporal flexibility challenges the view of a uniform presaccadic attention mechanism and suggests that presaccadic attentional deployment is shaped by movement goals. Our results provide new insights into how the visual and oculomotor systems coordinate under direction-specific demands. |
Jad Laaboudi; Anne Hillairet de Boisferon; Céline Paeye Pre-saccadic attention (and not arousal) modulates the size-eccentricity effect Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Laaboudi2025,Peripherally located objects are often perceived to be smaller than centrally located objects. This perceptual phenomenon, known as the Size-Eccentricity Effect (SEE), is mainly due to the structural properties of the visual system and is further modulated by covert attention. In this study, we evaluated whether pre-saccadic attention could also compensate for this effect. Participants performed a judgment task where they compared a test disk of varying size, briefly presented in peripheral vision, to a reference disk appearing 450 ms later in foveal vision. When no saccade was made towards the location of the test disk, the SEE was observed. However, when participants initiated saccades about 200 ms after the test disk extinction, points of subjective equality were close to objective equality. The second experiment aimed at excluding an explanation involving non-specific arousal mechanisms, also known to enhance visual perception. Participants executed a keypress or an antisaccade instead of a saccade. The SEE disappeared only in the saccade condition, confirming the crucial role of pre-saccadic attention shifts in this SEE compensation. Therefore, pre-saccadic attention improves not only the processing of orientation, contrast and spatial frequency (as previously demonstrated), but also the processing of peripheral object size. |
Chunyu Liang; Yili Chen; Yongyun Zhu; Yangfan Zhu; Jieyu Chen; Chenxi Liu; Fang Wang; Xinglong Yang Construction of a mild cognitive impairment prediction model for Parkinson's disease patients on the basis of multimodal data Journal Article In: npj Parkinson's Disease, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2025. @article{Liang2025b,This research aimed to establish a model predicting mild cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease patients (PDMCI) by integrating multimodal indicators. We prospectively collected general demographic data, clinical scales, gait parameters, eye tracking parameters, and neuroimaging parameters from 50 PDMCI patients, 50 Parkinson's disease patients with normal cognition (PDNCs), and 20 healthy controls (HCs). Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers and nested cross-validation were used to evaluate 31 feature combinations. Results demonstrated that the combination of clinical, gait, eye tracking, Diffusion Tensor Image Analysis along the Perivascular Space (DTI-ALPS), and Global Functional Connectivity Density (gFCD) features achieved an average accuracy of 0.9135 and an average area under the curve of 0.9602 on the test dataset. Notably, the combination of eye tracking and gait features also showed superior performance. These findings indicate that multimodal data integrated with machine learning (ML) can effectively distinguish between PDMCI and PDNC patients. |
Christina L. Master; Mitchell Scheiman; Olivia E. Podolak; Matthew F. Grady; David R. Howell In: Journal of Sport and Health Science, vol. 14, pp. 1–8, 2025. @article{Master2025,Background: Early identification of concussion-related vision disorders (CRVDs) may improve outcomes by enabling earlier management, referral, and treatment. Objective eye tracking may provide additional data to support the diagnose of CRVDs. The purpose of this study was to determine the utility of objective infrared eye tracking in identifying CRVDs among adolescents experiencing persisting post-concussive symptoms (PPCS) more than 28 days after injury. Methods: This was a prospective study of adolescents with PPCS evaluated with visio–vestibular examination (VVE), comprehensive vision examination, and an eye tracking device. Results: Of the 108 adolescents enrolled, 67 (62%) were diagnosed with a CRVD by comprehensive vision examination. On VVE, the near point of convergence break (5.5 ± 3.2 cm vs. 3.9 ± 1.7 cm (mean ± SD), p < 0.001) and recovery (8.1 ± 3.3 cm vs. 6.8 ± 2.3 cm |
Joonsik Moon; Peter Bex Distinctive feature sensitivity of ocular following initiation during global motion perception Journal Article In: Communications Biology, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Moon2025,We investigate how sensory and motor components of the visual system respond to carrier (first-order) and envelope (second-order) motion features for global motion perception. While both ocular following responses (OFRs) and perceptual judgments exhibit higher responsivity to envelope motion, carrier motion alone was insufficient, leading to large perceptual direction errors and speed biases and minimal OFRs. Shorter presentation times selectively impaired perceptual speed discriminability by decreasing the signal and increasing noise, with no corresponding effect on oculomotor responses. In direction discriminability analysis, in contrast, OFRs and perceptual responses have a similar relative noise pattern to motion features, suggesting shared noise sources in global motion processing. Trial-by-trial correlation analysis confirmed the dissociation where perceptual speed was uncorrelated with OFR speed, whereas perceptual direction showed a delayed correlation with eye direction relative to movement onset. This delayed correlation timing for direction suggests global motion modulates both systems via feedback control processes. |
Gabriela Mueller de Melo; Isabella Oliveira Pitorri; Gustavo Rohenkohl Presaccadic modulation of lateral interactions Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 25, no. 14, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{MuellerdeMelo2025,Lateral interactions are pervasive in early visual processing, contributing directly to processes such as object grouping and segregation. This study examines whether saccade preparation — known to affect visual perception —modulates lateral interactions. In a psychophysical task, participants were instructed to detect a Gabor target flanked by two adjacent Gabors, while they either prepared a saccade to the target or maintained central fixation. Flanker gratings could be iso- or orthogonally oriented to the target and were positioned at three different distances (4λ,8λ,and 16λ). Contrast thresholds for target detection were estimated in each condition using a 3-down/1-up staircase procedure. The results showed that in both presaccadic and fixation conditions, the target was suppressed at the shortest flanker distance (4λ), revealed by markedly higher thresholds in iso-oriented compared to orthogonal flanker configurations. Lateral interaction effects were completely abolished at their largest separation (16λ). Interestingly, at the intermediate flanker distance (8λ), target suppression seemed to increase during the presaccadic period, whereas no such effect was observed during fixation. This result suggests that saccade preparation can modulate lateral interactions, promoting suppressive effects over larger distances. These findings are consistent with the visual remapping phenomenon observed before saccade execution, especially the convergent remapping of receptive fields in oculomotor and visual areas. Finally, this presaccadic expansion of inhibitory lateral interactions could assist target selection by suppressing homogeneous peripheral signals — such as iso-oriented collinear patterns —while prioritizing the processing of more salient visual information. |
Surpiya Murali; Beshoy Agayby; Michael C. Schmid; Barbara F. Händel Multiunit and oscillatory activity in macaque V1 is modulated by blinking in a context-dependent way Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 35, no. 12, pp. 1–14, 2025. @article{Murali2025,Eye blinks modulate neural activity in visual areas even if the visual input is unchanged. Is the influence of blinking defined by the motor output of the blink? We analyzed blink-related neural activity with laminar resolution in V1 of two macaque monkeys in two conditions, viewing a video and at rest. During free viewing a video, blinks induced a modulation of the local field potential (LFP) in the theta, beta, and gamma band with a granular/infragranular focus. The multiunit activity (MUA) decreased around blink execution. Surprisingly, when comparing the results to blinks executed during the rest condition, we found that MUA increased around blinks. The blink-related LFP power changes, while increasing after a blink in both conditions, were significantly different in amplitude and latency. Our findings show that the blink induced modulation of V1 activity is not determined by the motor execution but depends on the condition in which the movement is executed. This suggests that interactions between movement and neural processes in sensory areas are context-dependent. These interactions may play an important role in predictive coding within the framework of active sensing. |
Dorsa Mir Norouzi; Norah M. Nyangau; Yi Zhong Wang; Lori M. Dao; Cynthia L. Beauchamp; David R. Stager; Jeffrey S. Hunter; Krista R. Kelly Slow binocular reading during rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) in children with amblyopia and the role of fixation instability Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 237, pp. 1–7, 2025. @article{Norouzi2025,Children with amblyopia read slower than their peers during binocular viewing. Ocular motor dysfunction typical of amblyopia may cause slow reading. It is unclear whether this is due to fixation instability or increased forward saccades. We examined whether removing the requirement of inter-word saccades helps children with amblyopia read at a similar rate as controls using a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task. We also assessed whether reading rate was related to fixation instability. Children with amblyopia (n = 32) and control (n = 30) children ages 8–12 years silently read sentences presented in RSVP (single word presentation at screen center) during binocular viewing. Exposure time per sentence changed with a 2 − down 1 − up staircase to obtain reading speed thresholds (log words/minute [WPM]). Eye movements were tracked to determine fellow eye (FE) and amblyopic eye (AE) fixation stability during RSVP reading. Children with amblyopia read slower than controls (2.75 ± 0.47 log WPM vs 3.06 ± 0.40 log WPM), and had increased AE fixation instability (0.21 ± 0.39 log deg2 vs − 0.20 ± 0.18 log deg2) and increased FE fixation instability (−0.03 ± 0.34 log deg2 vs − 0.20 ± 0.15 log deg2) during RSVP reading. Reading rate in amblyopic children with good FE stability (n = 11) did not differ from controls and was faster than those with poor FE stability (n = 21). Children with poor FE stability read slower than controls. Removing the need for inter-word saccades (i.e., RSVP reading) did not help children with amblyopia read at control speeds. Our data support FE fixation instability as a source of slow reading in amblyopia. |
Yangpan Ou; Zhaobin Chen; Ying Wang; Huabing Li; Feng Liu; Ping Li; Dongsheng Lv; Yong Liu; Bing Lang; Jingping Zhao; Wenbin Guo In: BMC Psychiatry, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2025. @article{Ou2025,Background: Clinical high-risk (CHR) refers to prodromal phase before schizophrenia onset, characterized by attenuated psychotic symptoms and functional decline. They exhibit similar but milder cognitive impairments, brain abnormalities and eye movement change compared with first-episode schizophrenia (FSZ). These alterations may increase vulnerability to transitioning to the disease. This study explores cognitive-related functional connectivity (FC) and eye movement abnormalities to examine differences in the progression of schizophrenia. Methods: Thirty drug-naive FSZ, 28 CHR, and 30 healthy controls (HCs) were recruited to undergo resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). Connectome-based predictive modeling (CPM) was employed to extract cognitive-related brain regions, which were then selected as seeds to form FC networks. Support vector machine (SVM) was used to distinguish FSZ from CHR. Smooth pursuit eye-tracking tasks were conducted to assess eye movement features. Results: FSZ displayed decreased cognitive-related FC between right posterior cingulate cortex and right superior frontal gyrus compared with HCs and between right amygdala and left inferior parietal gyrus (IPG) compared with CHR. SVM analysis indicated a combination of BACS-SC and CFT-A scores, and FC between right amygdala and left IPG could serve as a potential biomarker for distinguishing FSZ from CHR with high sensitivity. FSZ also exhibited a wide range of eye movement abnormalities compared with HCs, which were associated with alterations in cognitive-related FC. Conclusions: FSZ and CHR exhibited different patterns of cognitive-related FC and eye movement alteration. Our findings illustrate potential neuroimaging and cognitive markers for early identification of psychosis that could help in the intervention of schizophrenia in high-risk groups. |
Adam J. Parker; Muchan Tao; Martin R. Vasilev In: Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, vol. 32, no. 6, pp. 3055–3066, 2025. @article{Parker2025c,Return-sweeps, which move the reader's gaze from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, typically result in shorter line-final fixations and longer accurate line-initial fixations compared to intra-line fixations. The mechanisms underlying these differences have been the subject of debate. To assess the linguistic and oculomotor contributions to these return-sweep fixation differences, we compared the eye movements of 41 participants during reading and z-string scanning, an oculomotor control condition that is devoid of useful linguistic content. Our results indicate that line-final fixations are shorter than intra-line fixations, while accurate line-initial fixations are longer than intra-line fixations, under both tasks, underscoring the significant role of the oculomotor system in determining fixation durations across tasks. Notably, the reduction in line-final fixation durations compared to intra-line fixations did not differ between tasks. This suggests that oculomotor coordination or visual processing, rather than linguistic processing, drives shorter line-final fixations. In contrast, the difference in the increase in duration for accurate line-initial fixations between reading and z-string scanning implies that longer accurate line-initial fixations are likely a result of lexical processing, oculomotor coordination, and visual processing. These findings advance our understanding of eye movement control by highlighting the combined influence of linguistic and oculomotor processes on return-sweep fixation durations. |
Joris Perra; Bénédicte Poulin-Charronnat; Thierry Baccino; Patrick Bard; Philippe Pfister; Philippe Lalitte; Melissa Zerbib; Véronique Drai-Zerbib In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 78, no. 12, pp. 2660–2680, 2025. @article{Perra2025,Expertise is associated with a knowledge-driven information-processing approach. Experts benefit from long-term knowledge structures—chunks and retrieval structures/templates—leading them to formulate expectations about local stimulus characteristics and to extract information projected onto distant areas from the fixation location. In an attempt to shed light on the way knowledge-driven processing impacts eye movements during music reading, this study aimed to determine how expert musicians deal with local complexity in a sight-reading task. Thirty musicians from two expertise levels had to sight read 4 bar score excerpts. Local analyses were conducted to investigate how the gaze behaves prior to and during the sight reading of different score characteristics, such as alteration, location of the notes on the staff, note count, and heterogeneity of notes. The more experts (1) were less affected by the foveal load induced by local complexity, showing a lower increase in fixation durations between noncomplex features and local complexity compared to the less experts; (2) presented a saccadic flexibility towards the local complexity projected onto the parafoveal area, being the only group to exhibit shorter progressive incoming saccade sizes on accidentals and larger progressive incoming saccade sizes on new notes compared to noncomplex features; and (3) presented a visuo-motor flexibility depending on the played complexity, being the only group to exhibit a shorter eye-hand span when playing accidentals or distant notes compared to noncomplex features. Overall, this study highlights the usefulness of local analyses as a relevant tool to investigate foveal and parafoveal processing skills during music reading. |
Gioia Riboni-Verri; Christopher E. McMurran; Trisha Mukherjee; Cyrus Daruwalla; Jonathon Holland; Riddhima Gautam; Benson S. Chen; Emma Cutting; Wendi Qian; David MacManus; Declan T. Chard; J. William L. Brown; Alasdair J. Coles; Nick G. Cunniffe In: Trials, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 1–19, 2025. @article{Riboni-Verri2025,Background In multiple sclerosis (MS), progressive disability occurs following degeneration of demyelinated axons. A tractable approach to delay, prevent or reverse disability progression is through enhancement of endogenous remyelination. Clinical trials have deployed drugs, such as clemastine, to target the rate‑limiting step in this process: differentiation of oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs). Preclinical research has shown that metformin can reverse an age‑associated deficit in the responsiveness of OPCs to pro‑differentiation factors. The purpose of the Cambridge Centre for Myelin Repair trial Two (CCMR Two) is to evaluate the efficacy of the combination of metformin and clemastine to promote remyelination in people with MS. Methods Participants with relapsing‑remitting MS (RRMS) will be randomised 1:1 to the combination of metformin and clemastine or matched placebos and followed for 24 weeks of treatment. All participants must be stable on a disease‑modifying therapy and have evidence of chronic stable optic neuropathy in at least one eye (defined by P100 latency of the visual evoked potential (VEP) ≥ 118 ms, and the absence of a history of acute optic neuritis in the preceding 2 years). The primary outcome measure will be the change in the P100 latency of the full‑field VEP between baseline and week 26. It is planned to recruit a total of 70 participants. This will have 80% power to detect a reduction of 3 ms in VEP P100 latency between the two treatment groups. Secondary outcome measures will examine the change in multifocal VEP and the change in lesional magnetisation transfer ratio (MTR) for lesions stratified by location and tissue‑specific cohort baseline lesional MTR values. Discussion We set out the trial design, the rationale for participant and outcome measure selection, and the pre‑specified analyses. With this trial, we expect to be able to detect the structural and functional consequences of remy‑elination within a sample size feasible for our single‑centre trial. |
Martin Rolfs; Richard Schweitzer; Eric Castet; Tamara L. Watson; Sven Ohl Lawful kinematics link eye movements to the limits of high-speed perception Journal Article In: Nature Communications, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 1–17, 2025. @article{Rolfs2025,Perception requires active sampling of the environment. What part of the physical world can be perceived is limited by the sensory system's biophysical setup, but might be further constrained by the kinematic bounds of the motor actions used to acquire sensory information. Here, we tested this fundamental idea for humans' fastest and most frequent behavior—saccadic eye movements—which entail incidental sensory consequences (i.e., swift retinal motion) that rarely reach awareness in natural vision. Using high-speed video projection, we display rapidly moving stimuli that faithfully reproduce, or deviate from, saccades' lawful relation of velocity, duration, and amplitude. For each stimulus, observers perform perceptual tasks for which performance is contingent on consciously seeing the stimulus' motion trajectory. We uncover that visibility of the stimulus' movement is well predicted by the specific kinematics of saccades and their sensorimotor contingencies, reflecting even variability between individual observers. Computational modeling shows that spatiotemporal integration during early visual processing predicts this lawful relation in a tight range of biologically plausible parameters. These results suggest that the visual system takes into account motor kinematics when omitting an action's incidental sensory consequences, thereby preserving visual sensitivity to high-speed object motion. |
Gonzalo Ruarte; Gaston Bujia; Damián Care; Matias Julian Ison; Juan Esteban Kamienkowski Integrating Bayesian and neural networks models for eye movement prediction in hybrid search Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Ruarte2025,Visual search is crucial in daily human interaction with the environment. Hybrid search extends this by requiring observers to find any item from a given set. Recently, a few models were proposed to simulate human eye movements in visual search tasks within natural scenes, but none were implemented for Hybrid search under similar conditions. We present an enhanced neural network Entropy Limit Minimization (nnELM) model, grounded in a Bayesian framework and signal detection theory, and the Hybrid Search Eye Movements (HSEM) Dataset, containing thousands of human eye movements during hybrid tasks. A key Hybrid search challenge is that participants have to look for different objects at the same time. To address this, we developed several strategies involving the posterior probability distributions after each fixation. Adjusting peripheral visibility improved early-stage efficiency, aligning it with human behavior. Limiting the model's memory reduced success in longer searches, mirroring human performance. We validated these improvements by comparing our model with a held-out set within the HSEM and with other models in a separate visual search benchmark. Overall, the new nnELM model not only handles Hybrid search in natural scenes but also closely replicates human behavior, advancing our understanding of search processes while maintaining interpretability. |
Cristina Rubino; Adam T. Harrison; Lara A. Boyd Oculomotor learning is evident during implicit motor sequence learning Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, 2025. @article{Rubino2025,Motor sequence learning involves both oculomotor and manual motor systems, yet the role of the oculomotor system in the learning and execution of skilled arm movements remains underexplored. In the current work, the influence of sequence learning on the oculomotor system was investigated by testing 20 healthy adults for 3 days as they practiced an implicit motor learning task, the serial targeting task (STT). The STT contained a repeated sequence, which was interleaved with random sequences. This task was practiced on a KINARM robot that tracked both saccades and reaches. A delayed, 24-h retention test assessed sequence-specific motor learning. Sequence-specific changes across practice and learning were observed for both saccades and reaches; this was demonstrated by faster saccade and arm motor reaction times for the repeated sequence compared to random sequences. Notably, change in the oculomotor system occurred earlier in practice as compared to the manual motor system. Reaches were executed more quickly when led by express saccades (rapid eye movements occurring within 90–120 ms) compared to when they were preceded by regular latency (> 120 ms) saccades early in practice. Our findings highlight distinct yet interconnected functions between oculomotor and manual motor systems associated with implicit motor sequence learning. |
Anthony W. Sali; Madison P. Shaver; Anna B. Toledo; Austin L. Torain; Isabel N. Flicker Learned saccade readiness varies with fluctuations in sustained attention Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{Sali2025,Both the focus of sustained attention and an individual's readiness to shift attention among spatial locations fluctuate over time. However, the interaction of these ongoing changes in attentional states remains unknown. In the current study, participants completed a modified gradual continuous performance task during which they monitored one of two lateralized streams of black and white images for the appearance of frequent target stimuli, withholding responses to foils. Periodically, a visual cue signaled participants to either maintain fixation at the current stream or to make a saccade to the opposing stream, and participants made a parity categorization for a digit appearing at the cued location. Trial-by-trial variation in pupil size, an indicator of arousal, accounted for both fluctuations in sustained attention and shift readiness but fluctuations in sustained attention were not associated with general modulations of shift readiness. Furthermore, we manipulated the frequency of gaze shift cues over time and observed that unexpected shift cues were most disruptive when participants lacked sustained focus, yielding a greater cost in saccade latencies than when the efficacy of sustained attention was high. Our results suggest that ongoing changes in sustained attention occur independently from gaze shifting readiness but carry consequences for learned saccade preparation. |
Arunava Samaddar; Brooke S. Jackson; Nicole A. Lazar; Jennifer E. McDowell; Cheolwoo Park Brainpack: A suite of advanced statistical techniques for multi-subject and multi-group fMRI data analysis Journal Article In: Journal of the Korean Statistical Society, vol. 54, pp. 1076–1100, 2025. @article{Samaddar2025,Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data based on blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal have become widely available, leading to exponential growth in the number of published studies reporting on human brain function. fMRI data have also posed challenges, including a low signal to noise ratio, various noise sources, correlation between observations, and size of the data set. Also, researchers are interested in drawing conclusions from a sample of subjects to a relevant population, and in comparing the performance between groups of people. Our motivating fMRI data involve both block and event-related runs, multiple tasks, scanning sessions, and groups of subjects. The objective of this study is to identify brain regions associated with performance of cognitive tasks and to observe the effects of practice as measured by BOLD signal across different tasks and contexts. To accomplish the goal, we develop a suite of reliable and robust statistical tools, called BrainPack, that is composed of aggregation, decorrelation, data volume reduction, cluster analysis, and comparison of group clustered maps. The proposed approach does not require a specific model, can detect signals from noisy data, and take temporal correlations into account compared to model-based analysis. Through use of the BrainPack suite, we find practice-induced BOLD signal attenuation across groups and tasks in regions associated with sensorimotor and cognitive control processes. The BrainPack application improves existing between-group analysis methods to solve persistent problems in fMRI data analysis using the following advancements: (i) robust, effective, and powerful analyses for identifying neural circuits across any group using statistical learning methods and (ii) optimized multiple group analysis methods using simultaneous comparison of group maps. |
Sandra Tyralla; Eckart Zimmermann Serial dependencies and overt attention shifts Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 25, no. 14, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Tyralla2025,When visual input is uncertain, visual perception is biased toward the stimulation from the recent past. We can attend to stimuli either endogenously based on an internal decision or exogenously, triggered by an external event. Here, we wondered whether serial dependencies are selective for the attentional mode which we draw to stimuli. We studied overt attention shifts: saccades and recorded either motor error correction or visual orientation judgments. In Experiment 1, we assessed sensorimotor serial dependencies, focusing on how the postsaccadic error influences subsequent saccade amplitudes. In Experiment 2, we evaluated visual serial dependencies by measuring orientation judgments, contingent on the type of saccade performed. In separate sessions, participants performed either only voluntary saccades or only delayed saccades, or both saccade types alternated within a session. Our results revealed that sensorimotor serial dependencies were selective for the saccade type performed. When voluntary saccades had been performed in the preceding trial, serial dependencies were much stronger in the current trial if voluntary instead of delayed saccades were executed. In contrast, visual serial dependencies were not influenced by the type of saccade performed. Our findings reveal that shifts in exogenous and endogenous attention differentially impact sensorimotor serial dependencies, but visual serial dependencies remain unaffected. |
Suraj Upadhyaya Oculomotor dynamics in emmetropes, myopes, and hyperopes: A behavioral perspective Journal Article In: PloS One, vol. 20, no. 12, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Upadhyaya2025a,PURPOSE: The oculomotor system, which controls eye movements, is closely linked to visual processing. While refractive errors are common, their influence on oculomotor behavior remains underexplored. This study compared oculomotor performance among emmetropic, myopic, and hyperopic individuals. METHODS: In this cross-sectional, single-visit study, 67 participants (33 myopes, 10 hyperopes, 24 emmetropes; mean age 25.9 ± 3.0 years) completed fixation and visually guided saccade tasks at a viewing distance of 57 cm. A centrally positioned black, disc-shaped target (0.50° in diameter) was displayed on the screen for 45 seconds, after which it shifted to a predetermined location to elicit visually guided saccades. Clinical measures were included in the correlation analysis to ensure the findings were clinically relevant and to examine relationships between research variables and patient outcomes. Eye movements were recorded using the EyeLink 1000Plus. Fixation stability was quantified using Bivariate Contour Ellipse Area (BCEA). Fixational saccade metrics, vergence stability, and saccadic behavior were analyzed. Axial length and corneal power were measured using a portable ultrasound scanner. RESULTS: Fixation stability differed significantly across groups, with myopes exhibiting larger BCEA values compared to emmetropes (H[2] = 10.6, p < 0.05). Analysis of fixational saccades revealed that myopes demonstrated significantly greater amplitude (H[2] = 507.4, p < 0.001), peak velocity (H[2] = 595.7, p < 0.001), and frequency (H[2] = 9.0, p < 0.05) relative to the other groups. Vergence stability was also poorer in myopes than in emmetropes (H[2] = 8.7, p < 0.05). In contrast, saccadic behavior during visually guided tasks showed no significant group differences in latency (H[2] = 1.9 |
Preeti Verghese; Adrien Chopin; Ângela Gomes-Tomaz; Noelia G. Alcalde; Dennis M. Levi Vergence anomalies are associated with impaired stereopsis in amblyopia Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 237, pp. 1–16, 2025. @article{Verghese2025,We examined the relationship between stereopsis and fusional vergence in groups of amblyopic and stereo-normal control observers. As absolute disparity is thought to be the basis for relative disparity and for disparity-driven vergence, we hypothesized that vergence anomalies would be accompanied by impaired stereopsis. Specifically, we examined whether patterns of impaired stereopsis across the central 20° of the visual field were accompanied by impaired fusional vergence for stimuli confined to these regions. Stereopsis was measured locally across the visual field with disparity steps of 5 to 20 arcmin. Fusional vergence to large disparity steps (2 to 3°) was measured with binocular eye tracking. The vergence stimuli were random dot stereograms, in one of 3 spatial configurations: a large disc 16° in diameter, a small disc 4° in diameter, and an annulus with outer and inner diameters corresponding to the large and small discs. Of the controls (n = 25) with no history of abnormal visual development, 12 individuals exhibited normal stereopsis across the visual field and normal vergence gains for all configurations. Thirteen individuals with weak stereopsis in the central field tended to have anomalous vergence for small stimuli, but normal vergence for larger stimuli. Amblyopic/strabismic individuals (n = 12) had poor stereopsis and poor vergence for small stimuli. We report a strong correlation between vergence, coarse and fine stereopsis, with no double dissociation (no cases of impaired vergence with normal stereopsis). Taken together, the results suggest that compromised binocular interaction is the cause of both stereopsis and vergence deficits. |
Luan Zimmermann Bortoluzzi; Estêvão Carlos-Lima; Gabriela Mueller de Melo; Melissa Hongjin Song Zhu; Gustavo Rohenkohl Presaccadic attentional shifts are not modulated by saccade amplitude Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2025. @article{ZimmermannBortoluzzi2025,Humans constantly explore the visual environment through saccades, bringing relevant visual stimuli to the center of the gaze. Before the eyes begin to move, visual attention is directed to the intended saccade target. As a consequence of this presaccadic shift of attention (PSA), visual perception is enhanced at the future gaze position. PSA has been investigated in a variety of saccade amplitudes, from microsaccades to locations that exceed the oculomotor range. Interestingly, recent studies have shown that PSA effects on visual perception are not equally distributed around the visual field. However, it remains unknown whether the magnitude of presaccadic perceptual enhancement varies with the amplitude of the saccades. Here, we measured contrast sensitivity thresholds during saccade planning in a two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) discrimination task in human observers. Filtered pink noise (1/f) patches, presented at four eccentricities scaled in size according to the cortical magnification factor were used as visual targets. This method was adopted to mitigate well-known eccentricity effects on perception, thereby enabling us to explore the effects associated to saccade amplitudes. First, our results show that saccade preparation enhanced contrast sensitivity in all tested eccentricities. Importantly, we found that this presaccadic perceptual enhancement was not modulated by the amplitude of the saccades. These findings suggest that presaccadic attention operates consistently across different saccade amplitudes, enhancing visual processing at intended gaze positions regardless of saccade size. |
Sahand Amir-Asgari; Stefan Georgiev; Manuel Ruiss; Sotiris Plainis; Caroline Pilwachs; Oliver Findl In: BMC Ophthalmology, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2025. @article{AmirAsgari2025,Background: To compare oculomotor behavior and reading performance along with conventional visual outcomes in patients following implantation of an enhanced depth of focus (EDOF) intraocular lens (IOL) versus a monofocal IOL. Methods: In this prospective, exploratory, randomized, clinical trial patients underwent either bilateral implantation with a non-diffractive EDOF IOL DFT015 (Acrysof IQ Vivity, Alcon, USA) or an aspheric monofocal IOL SN60WF (Acrysof IQ, Alcon, USA). 106 eyes of 53 patients with bilateral age-related cataract were evaluated (EDOF IOL group: n = 25; Monofocal IOL group n = 28). At 3 months after surgery, along with visual acuity at various distances, halometry, and patient-reported quality of vision, silent reading performance and oculomotor behavior were assessed at 66 cm with an infrared eye tracker under photopic and mesopic light levels. Data analysis included computation of reading speed and a range of oculomotor indices. Results: Median mesopic silent reading speed in words per minute (wpm) and fixation duration in milliseconds (ms) were 205 wpm and 277 ms for the EDOF group and 168 wpm (p = 0.04) and 301 ms (p = 0.02) for the monofocal control IOL group, respectively. No significant differences were observed under photopic conditions. Binocular means expressed in logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution for postoperative corrected distance, uncorrected distance, uncorrected intermediate, and uncorrected near visual acuities were − 0.04 ± 0.07, 0.00 ± 0.07, 0.12 ± 0.09, and 0.27 ± 0.13 for the EDOF group and − 0.08 ± 0.06 (p = 0.08), -0.04 ± 0.07 (p = 0.10), 0.19 ± 0.13 (p = 0.01), and 0.41 ± 0.14 (p = < 0.001) for the control group, respectively. Postoperative halo size and visual disturbances were similar in both groups. Conclusions: Silent reading speed at 66 cm distance is found improved with EDOF compared to monofocal IOLs only at mesopic light levels, mainly due to the improvement in average fixation duration. Further studies are needed to confirm these preliminary findings. |
Bilikis Banire; Hailey Burns; Dawson Sutherland; Youna McGowan; Sherry H. Stewart; Raymond M. Klein; Sandra Meier Role of social competence in emotion processing among emerging adults with anxiety Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–14, 2025. @article{Banire2025,Individuals with anxiety disorders tend to gravitate their attention to faces showing anger, which may reinforce fears associated with social situations and impact their social competence. Yet it is unclear whether social competence may explain differences in attention allocation to emotional faces in anxiety disorders. This study used eye-tracking to assess gaze patterns in 57 females aged 15 to 24 who viewed emotional faces (angry and neutral) on a screen. It explored whether latency to first fixation and dwell time on emotional faces (female and male) are dependent on anxiety symptoms and social competence, and if social competence accounts for the association of anxiety with attention allocation. With increasing anxiety symptoms, participants' dwell time on neutral compared to angry female faces increased, yet no effects were observed for male faces. Similarly, with decreasing social competence, participants' dwell time on neutral compared to angry female faces increased, yet no differences were observed for male faces. Contrary to the hypothesis, social competence did not account for the effects of anxiety on attention allocation. No effects were observed for latency to first fixation. Anxiety and social competence are both independently associated with attentional biases toward facial expressions in female participants. Yet, these associations seemed to depend on the gender of the face seen. |
Dana Basel; Rotem Asher; Amit Lazarov Reward learning in obsessive-compulsive disorder: An attentional perspective Journal Article In: Motivation and Emotion, vol. 49, no. 6, pp. 717–730, 2025. @article{Basel2025,Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has been recently associated with aberrant reward learning. In the realm of attention, a previous study using an eye-tracking version of the reward-based value modulated attentional capture (VMAC) task showed a greater interference by high-reward signaling distractors than low-reward signaling distractors among obsessive-compulsive individuals compared with controls. However, this study used individuals with high and low levels of obsessive-compulsive symptoms, restricting generalizability to clinical OCD, while also inherently confounding OCD and anxiety. The present study addressed both these limitations. The eye-tracking-based VMAC task was completed by clinically diagnosed OCD participants (n=32), participants with anxiety disorders (AN; n=30), and healthy controls (HC; n=31). Attentional capture by high and low reward-signaling distractors was assessed via number of fixations on these distractors and number of first saccades toward them. Both fixation and saccade data showed a heightened VMAC effect (i.e., higher attentional capture by high-reward signaling distractors than low-reward signaling distractors) among OCD participants, compared with both AN and HC participants. Surprisingly, the AN group showed no VMAC effect, reflecting blunted attentional reward learning. The current VMAC task did not include an extinction phase, and hence could not examine the endurance of the VMAC effect when no reward is available. Also, the study did not explore potential performance differences across different OCD subtypes. |
Karen Emmorey; Emily M. Akers; Emily Saunders; Marzieh Bannazadeh; Elizabeth Droubi; Frances G. Cooley; Elizabeth R. Schotter Assessing the effects of sign language experience versus deafness on the leftward reading span Journal Article In: Cognitive Science, vol. 49, no. 12, pp. 1–21, 2025. @article{Emmorey2025,Both deafness and sign language experience impact the distribution of visual attention, and either factor could affect reading span size, the area around fixation from which useful information is obtained. In contrast to the typical asymmetrical span (smaller on the left), deaf signers have a larger leftward span than skill-matched hearing readers. We investigated whether this enhanced span is due to changes in visual attention associated with early deafness or sign language experience (right-handed signs fall in the left periphery). A gaze-contingent moving-window paradigm was used to assess the leftward reading span of hearing early signers, deaf early signers, and hearing nonsigners with similar reading abilities. The size of the leftward span for deaf and hearing signers was the same (10 characters) and was larger than that of hearing nonsigners (4 characters). Thus, sign language experience appears to be at least one source of the larger leftward span in deaf signers. However, deaf signers were more efficient readers than both hearing groups (faster reading rate, more skipped words, fewer regressions), suggesting that their greater reading efficiency does not stem solely from a larger leftward span. |
Mariana Ferreira; João Pedro Marques; Miguel Raimundo; Hugo Quental; Miguel Castelo-Branco Improvements induced by retinal gene therapy with voretigene neparvovec depend on visual cortical hemispheric dominance mechanisms Journal Article In: Communications Medicine, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1–9, 2025. @article{Ferreira2025,Background: RPE65-associated retinal degeneration (RPE65-RD) causes severe visual deficits. Gene therapy with AAV2-hRPE65v2 is a breakthrough but it is currently unknown which visual pathways benefit from treatment and if cortical mechanisms can amplify retinal improvements. Methods: In this within-subject design, ten patients with biallelic RPE65-RD underwent sub-retinal injection of AAV2-hRPE65v2. Psychophysical full-field stimulus threshold determination and functional magnetic resonance imaging were performed before and 12 months after treatment. Population receptive fields (pRF) were computed in V1 and visual responses assessed using contrast-reversed checkerboards (3 contrast levels). Results: Here we show significant improvement in light sensitivity at low-luminance and neural response enhancements under low-luminance conditions specifically in the right hemisphere, which is known to show dominance in attentional and visual pooling of spatial information. Changes in pRF size also reflect known hemispheric spatial asymmetries (left/right biased for local/global analysis, respectively). Conclusions: Our findings show a contribution of known early and high-level cortical dominance mechanisms on improvement, which constrain the effects of therapy and are therefore a target for neurorehabilitation. These findings provide insight into the limits of clinical benefits of gene therapy and suggest that neurorehabilitation approaches may be needed to enhance improvements, similarly to cochlear implants. |
Justin T. Fleming; Matthew B. Winn Seeing a talker's mouth reduces the effort of perceiving speech and repairing perceptual mistakes for listeners with cochlear implants Journal Article In: Ear and Hearing, vol. 46, no. 6, pp. 1502–1518, 2025. @article{Fleming2025,Objectives: Seeing a talker's mouth improves speech intelligibility, particularly for listeners who use cochlear implants (CIs). However, the impacts of visual cues on listening effort for listeners with CIs remain poorly understood, as previous studies have focused on listeners with typical hearing (TH) and featured stimuli that do not invoke effortful cognitive speech perception challenges. This study directly compared the effort of perceiving audiovisual speech between listeners who use CIs and those with TH. Visual cues were hypothesized to yield more relief from listening effort in a cognitively challenging speech perception condition that required listeners to mentally repair a missing word in the auditory stimulus. Eye gaze was simultaneously measured to examine whether the tendency to look toward a talker's mouth would increase during these moments of uncertainty about the speech stimulus. Design: Participants included listeners with CIs and an age-matched group of participants with typical age-adjusted hearing (N = 20 in both groups). The magnitude and time course of listening effort were evaluated using pupillometry. In half of the blocks, phonetic visual cues were severely degraded by selectively blurring the talker's mouth, which preserved stimulus luminance so visual conditions could be compared using pupillometry. Each block included a mixture of trials in which the sentence audio was intact, and trials in which a target word in the auditory stimulus was replaced by noise; the latter required participants to mentally reconstruct the target word upon repeating the sentence. Pupil and gaze data were analyzed using generalized additive mixed-effects models to identify the stretches of time during which effort or gaze strategy differed between conditions. Results: Visual release from effort was greater and lasted longer for listeners with CIs compared with those with TH. Within the CI group, visual cues reduced effort to a greater extent when a missing word needed to be repaired than when the speech was intact. Seeing the talker's mouth also improved speech intelligibility for listeners with CIs, including reducing the number of incoherent verbal responses when repair was required. The two hearing groups deployed different gaze strategies when perceiving audiovisual speech. CI listeners looked more at the mouth overall, even when it was blurred, while TH listeners tended to increase looks to the mouth in the moment following a missing word in the auditory stimulus. Conclusions: Integrating visual cues from a talker's mouth not only improves speech intelligibility but also reduces listening effort, particularly for listeners with CIs. For listeners with CIs (but not those with TH), these visual benefits are magnified when a missed word needs to be mentally corrected—a common occurrence during everyday speech perception for individuals with hearing loss. These results underscore the importance of including participants with hearing loss in listening effort studies and suggest caution in assuming results from TH listeners will generalize to those with hearing loss. They also highlight the potential clinical relevance of visual speech information, for counseling patients and families and potentially for the development of audiovisual strategies to reduce listening effort. |
Davide Frattini; Mariagrazia Benassi; Tobias Wibble; Mattias Nilsson; Roberto Bolzani; Tony Pansell Temporal visual processing deficits in post concussion syndrome Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Frattini2025,Post-concussive (PCS) motion hypersensitivity represents a common sequela of mild traumatic brain injury. This study investigated whether PCS alters visual temporal resolution thresholds in psychophysical measures that sustain motion detection. Fifteen PCS patients and fifteen age-matched controls underwent critical flicker fusion (CFF) threshold assessments across visual-field eccentricities. A Generalized linear mixed model tested group differences in CFF thresholds, treating eccentricity as a repeated factor and including CFF variability as a covariate. Pupil measurements and catch trials controlled for fatigue and alertness. Nonparametric correlations assessed relationships among time from injury, symptom severity, and CFF measures. Results showed CFF variability heightening CFF thresholds in the PCS group to a significantly larger extent compared to controls. Absence of significant CFF variability differences between groups, and modulation by eccentricity, suggests perceptual noise more strongly influences the overall visual temporal sensitivity in PCS. Days since injury negatively correlated with variability, indicating compensatory stabilization of temporal sensitivity over time. Symptom severity did not correlate with CFF measures. In conclusion, PCS motion hypersensitivity may reflect disturbances in visual temporal processing parameters, potentially involving altered internal neural noise. Although some recalibration occurs post-injury, persistent abnormalities underscore the need for further research into early, clinical interventions targeting perceptual noise. |
Jessica Galli; Marika Vezzoli; Erika Loi; Serena Micheletti; Anna Molinaro; Lucia Tagliavento; Stefano Calza; Alexander N. Sokolov; Marina A. Pavlova; Elisa Fazzi Alterations in looking at face-pareidolia images in autism Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, 2025. @article{Galli2025,Face tuning is vital for adaptive and effective social cognition and interaction. This capability is impaired in a wide range of mental conditions including autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Yet the origins of this deficit are largely unknown. Here, an eye-tracking methodology had been implemented in adolescents with high-functioning ASD and in typically developing (TD) matched controls while administering a face-pareidolia task. The spatial distributions of eye fixation in five regions of interest [face, eyes, mouth, CFA (complementary face area, a face area beyond eyes and mouth) and non-face area (a screen area outside a face)] were recorded during spontaneous recognition of a set of Arcimboldo-like Face-n-Food images presented in a predetermined order from the least to most resembling a face. Individuals with ASD gave significantly fewer face responses and looked more often at the mouth, CFA, and non-face areas. By contrast, TD controls mostly fixated the face and eyes areas. The atypical visual scanning strategies could, at least partly, account for the lower face tuning in ASD, supporting the eye avoidance hypothesis, according to which ASD individuals concentrate less on the eyes because the eyes represent a source of emotional information that may make them feel uncomfortable. |
Krista R. Kelly; Mina Nouradanesh; Reed M. Jost; Christina S. Cheng-Patel; Eileen E. Birch; Serena X. Wang; James Y. Tung; Ewa Niechwiej-Szwedo Eye-hand coordination during visually-guided reaching in children with monocular deprivation amblyopia Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 237, pp. 1–10, 2025. @article{Kelly2025,Monocular deprivation (MD) amblyopia caused by a dense unilateral congenital or infantile cataract leads to both sensory and ocular motor deficits, which can in turn affect motor performance. Previous research shows reduced fine motor skills in children with MD amblyopia on standardized tasks. Here, we evaluate eye-hand coordination during visually-guided reaching in MD amblyopia. A group of 17 children aged 7–15 years with MD amblyopia resulting from a unilateral cataract and a group of 41 age-similar control children were enrolled. During binocular viewing, children's reaching movements (LEAP Motion Controller) and eye movements (EyeLink 1000 binocular eye tracker) were recorded as they reached to touch a dot displayed at one of four locations (±5 deg or ±10 deg) on a computer monitor. Saccade and reach kinematic measures were assessed between groups, and factors associated with impairments in the MD amblyopia group were evaluated. The MD amblyopia group as a whole had impaired saccade (lower saccade gain, reduced saccade precision, more reach-related saccades) and reach (longer total reach duration, slower peak velocity, reduced touch accuracy) kinematics compared to controls. However, performance was worse in those with a poorer visual acuity outcome (≥0.7 logMAR) compared to good visual acuity outcome (≤0.6 logMAR). MD amblyopia impacts the development of eye-hand coordination during reaching, particularly in those with a poorer visual acuity outcome. Longer deceleration in the final approach and more reach-related saccades may suggest an inability to adapt or form an efficient compensatory strategy and may also be indicative of impaired on-line control. |
Jamie Koerner; Erin Zou; Jessica A. Karl; Cynthia Poon; Leo Verhagen Metman; Charles G. Sodini; Vivienne Sze; Fabian J. David; Thomas Heldt In: npj Parkinson's Disease, vol. 11, no. 1, 2025. @article{Koerner2025,Early detection and monitoring of Parkinson's disease (PD) remain challenging, highlighting the need for accessible, cost-effective tools. Saccadic eye movement abnormalities are promising noninvasive biomarkers for PD screening and monitoring. Here, we present an iPad-based system that uses a deep learning algorithm to extract saccade metrics and validate these metrics against the clinical-grade EyeLink 1000 Plus. Twenty-five participants (10 with PD, 15 controls) completed pro-saccade, anti-saccade, memory-guided-saccade, and self-generated-saccade tasks. Relative to the EyeLink, the iPad system achieved average subject-level errors of 2 ms for latency and 0.7∘ for amplitude in pro-, anti-, and memory-guided saccades, and 0.003 s−1 for inter-saccadic rate and 1.6∘ for amplitude in self-generated saccades. A review of 22 studies on PD-related saccadic impairments established benchmarks for clinically meaningful effects. The iPad-based system meets or exceeds these benchmarks, supporting its use as a scalable and cost-effective tool for screening and monitoring PD. |
Sharif I. Kronemer; Victoria E. Gobo; Shruti Japee; Elisha P. Merriam; Benjamin Osborne; Peter A. Bandettini; Tina T. Liu Eye metrics often reflect visual conscious awareness, conscious content, and neural processing in cerebral blindness Journal Article In: Communications Biology, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1724, 2025. @article{Kronemer2025a,<p>Cerebral blindness is caused by damage to the primary visual pathway. Some people with cerebral blindness retain degraded vision and non-visual sensations and can perform visually guided behaviors within their blind visual field. These cases raise questions about visual conscious perception and residual neural processing in cerebral blindness. A major challenge in this research is that subjective reporting on experiences in the blind field can be unreliable. Alternatively, eye metrics offer a promising objective marker of conscious awareness, conscious content, and brain activity. In this study, we recorded visual stimulus-evoked pupil size, blink, and microsaccade responses in neurotypical participants and both the sighted and blind fields of cerebrally blind participants. For most patients, we found that eye metrics inferred conscious awareness in the blind field. Also, pupil size responded to both real and illusory stimulus luminance in the sighted field but not in the blind field. Furthermore, eye metrics were linked to visual stimulus-evoked occipital cortical field potentials in the blind field, suggesting residual cortical processing. These findings support eye metrics as an indicator of visual conscious perception and neural processing in cerebral blindness, with potential applications for tracking vision recovery following damage to the primary visual pathway.</p> |
Lauren Luther; Rebecca F. Mathis; William R. Keller; Robert W. Buchanan; James M. Gold; James I. Koeing; Gregory P. Strauss Aberrant visual attention is associated with social judgements of attractiveness and negative symptoms in schizophrenia Journal Article In: Schizophrenia Research, vol. 286, pp. 1–8, 2025. @article{Luther2025,Accurate perception of facial attractiveness supports normative social motivation and approach behaviors, in part via its association with endogenous oxytocin levels. Individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) display impaired social functioning that is associated with endogenous oxytocin levels. However, it is unclear whether judgements of facial attractiveness and the attentional processes that support them contribute to social abnormalities in SZ. The current study examined whether judgements of facial attractiveness and gaze behavior were associated with negative symptoms, social functioning, and oxytocin. Forty-one individuals with SZ and 23 healthy controls (CN) rated male and female facial stimuli for levels of attractiveness while gaze behavior was recorded via eye-tracking. Fixation count and gaze duration in facial regions of interest were used to evaluate facial scanning behavior. Plasma oxytocin concentrations were derived via radioimmunoassay. CN and SZ did not significantly differ on perceptions of facial attractiveness; however, SZ displayed an aberrant visual scan pattern characterized by reduced attention to salient facial features on both male and female faces. Further, this aberrant scanning pattern was associated with greater negative symptoms and reduced social functioning in SZ. Oxytocin was not associated with attractiveness perceptions or gaze behavior. Findings suggest that negative symptoms and social functioning are associated with diminished judgements of facial attractiveness and corresponding patterns of aberrant gaze behavior. Attention training programs focused on increasing gaze to salient facial features may support better social functioning and lower negative symptoms in SZ. |
Haneieh Molaei; Reza Abbas Farishta; Reza Farivar Letter distortion mapping in amblyopia: Spatial patterns, stability, and relationship to visual acuity Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, vol. 66, no. 15, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Molaei2025,PURPOSE. To investigate whether letter-based perceptual distortions in amblyopia follow spatially consistent patterns across different letters and to determine if these spatial distortion maps are letter specific or reflect a common underlying spatial organization of visual distortion in the amblyopic eye. METHODS. Twenty-one individuals with amblyopia completed a distortion mapping task using the letters A, D, and E, shown at 36 visual field locations. Each letter was first viewed with the fellow eye and then with the amblyopic eye. Participants reported distortions, which were recorded to generate binary spatial maps. The task was repeated over three sessions to assess within-subject consistency, and spatial correlations were analyzed across letters and subjects. RESULTS. Letter distortions were reported by 95% of participants and remained consistent across sessions. Within subjects, spatial distortion maps were significantly correlated across letters in 62% of cases (P ≤ 0.028), suggesting shared spatial patterns. However, across subjects, maps were largely uncorrelated, indicating individualized distortion profiles. No single letter consistently showed more distortion across the group, χ2(2) = 1.279 |
Arasch Mostauli; Jonas Rauh; Matthias Gamer; Christian Büchel; Winfried Rief; Stefanie Brassen Placebo treatment entails resource-dependent downregulation of negative inputs Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Mostauli2025,Clinical trials with antidepressants reveal significant improvements in placebo groups, with effects of up to 80% compared to real treatment. While it has been suggested that treatment expectations rely on cognitive control, direct evidence for affective placebo effects is sparse. Here, we investigated how cognitive resources at both the behavioral and neural levels influence the effects of positive expectations on emotional processing. Forty-nine healthy volunteers participated in a cross-over fMRI study where positive expectations were induced through an alleged oxytocin nasal spray and verbal instruction. Participants completed a spatial cueing task that manipulated attention to emotional face distractors while being scanned and were characterized regarding their general attention control ability. Placebo treatment improved mood and reduced distractibility from fearful compared to happy faces, particularly when more attentional resources were available for processing face distractors. This aligned with changes in activation and functional coupling within prefrontal-limbic networks, suggesting that expectations induce top-down regulation of aversive inputs. Additionally, neurobehavioral effects correlated with individual control ability. Our findings highlight the critical role of cognitive resources in verbally instructed placebo effects. This may be particularly relevant in patients with major depressive disorder, who often demonstrate enhanced negativity processing but have limited cognitive control capacity. |
Krishna S. Nair; Nicholas Hedger; Roana Liz George; Goutam Chandra; Kochupurackal P. Mohanakumar; Bhismadev Chakrabarti; Usha Rajamma Eye tracking demonstrates the influence of autistic traits on social attention in a community sample from India Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, 2025. @article{Nair2025,The ability to attend to social stimuli is fundamental for processing social cues and shaping social behavior, yet cultural variability in this capacity remains relatively unexplored. Social attention is typically tested using preferential-looking paradigms in labs, which have demonstrated that autistic individuals attend less to social stimuli. Such studies are limited, by the fact that they have almost all been conducted in Western Europe and the USA. To address this gap, our objective was to test the cultural generalizability of these results by investigating whether autistic symptoms are negatively associated with social attention in a traditionally understudied sample: Indian adults. Additionally, we tested the specificity of this relation by investigating whether a similar association exists with the traits of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Our study involved 121 young adults from Kerala, India. Autistic and ADHD traits were evaluated using the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) and Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS), respectively. The participants' gaze behavior was recorded during a preferential-looking task, where pairs of social and non-social images were presented simultaneously. Individuals with higher autistic traits exhibited a reduced preference for social stimuli. No such association of social attention was noted with ADHD traits. Follow-up analysis of AQ subscales indicated that the association between gaze duration and autistic traits was driven by the social, and not the attention to detail factor of autistic traits. Our results provide new evidence for the cultural generalizability of the social attention task and offer the potential for culture-agnostic phenotypic assessments for adults with autism. |
Ewa Niechwiej-Szwedo; Susana Wu; Deborah Giaschi; Linda Colpa; Agnes M. F. Wong; Lisa Christian Eye-hand coordination during a precision grasping and placement task in children with a history of amblyopia Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 237, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{NiechwiejSzwedo2025a,Eye-hand coordination is a key aspect of visuomotor control essential for performing most daily activities. Disruption in visuomotor control, characterized by slower arm movements and grasping errors, has been documented in children with amblyopia. This study aimed to characterize the effects of amblyopia on the temporal pattern of eye and hand coordination during the performance of a task that involves reaching, precision grasping, and placement. The study recruited 28 children with a history of amblyopia and 56 typically developing peers (age range 6–14 years). Children performed a bead-threading task while their eyes and hand movements were recorded concurrently. As hypothesized, children with amblyopia demonstrated poorer task performance, with greater deficits for the object manipulation compared to the reaching (transport) components. In comparison to their peers with normal vision, children with amblyopia had shorter reaction time for initiating eye and hand movement, longer object fixation duration to guide grasp execution and object placement, and lower eye-hand latency difference for the second movement indicating that the hand movement preceded eye initiation. These results suggest that children with amblyopia have poorer motor planning ability, which impacts movement execution. Longer fixations during object manipulations indicate that more time is required to transform the noisy visual input into a motor response. Overall, the study adds to the growing body of evidence highlighting deficits in visuomotor control in amblyopia. |
Claire O'Callaghan; Frank H. Hezemans; Naresh Subramaniam; Rong Ye; Kamen A. Tsvetanov; Alexander G. Murley; Negin Holland; Isabella F. Orlando; Ralf Regenthal; Roger A. Barker; Caroline H. Williams-Gray; Luca Passamonti; Trevor W. Robbins; James B. Rowe Pharmacological and pupillary evidence for the noradrenergic contribution to reinforcement learning in Parkinson's disease Journal Article In: Communications Biology, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1–15, 2025. @article{OCallaghan2025,Noradrenaline plays an integral role in learning by optimising behavioural strategies and facilitating choice execution. Testing the noradrenergic framework of learning in the context of human diseases offers a test bed for current normative neuroscience theories and may also indicate therapeutic potential. Parkinson's disease is often considered as a model of dopamine deficits, including dopamine's role in reinforcement learning. However, noradrenergic function is also severely impaired by Parkinson's disease, contributing to cognitive deficits. Using a single dose of the noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor atomoxetine in people with Parkinson's disease (in a randomised double-blind placebo-controlled crossover design), we show improvements in learning compared to placebo. Computational cognitive modelling confirmed a substantial shift in the decision noise parameter, indicative of more exploitative choices. This response pattern closely resembled that of age-matched controls and simulations of optimal response strategies. Pupillometry revealed increased baseline pupil diameter under atomoxetine, which correlated with behavioural improvements, and a heightened phasic pupillary response to feedback. Our findings confirm the noradrenergic contribution to reinforcement learning, and in doing so they challenge the simple interpretation of tonic-phasic locus coeruleus firing patterns based on pupillometry. Noradrenergic modulation is a potential treatment strategy for cognitive symptoms in Parkinson's disease and related disorders. |
Estelle Raffin; Michele Bevilacqua; Fabienne Windel; Pauline Menoud; Roberto F. Salamanca-Giron; Sarah Feroldi; Sarah B. Zandvliet; Nicola Ramdass; Laurijn Draaisma; Patrik Vuilleumier; Adrian G Guggisberg; Christophe Bonvin; Lisa Fleury; Krystel R. Huxlin; Elena Beanato; Friedhelm C. Hummel Boosting hemianopia recovery: The power of interareal cross-frequency brain stimulation Journal Article In: Brain, vol. 148, pp. 4548–4561, 2025. @article{Raffin2025,Visual field loss is a common consequence of stroke and manifests in approximatively one-third of patients in the chronic stage. Such loss can significantly impact daily life activities, compromising tasks such as reading, navigating or driving. Although slow and labour intensive, evidence suggests that early interventions with tailored rehabilitation programmes might stimulate visual recovery and improve quality of life in stroke survivors.To enhance the effects of such rehabilitation programmes, we designed a novel, non-invasive, pathway-specific, physiology-inspired cross-frequency brain stimulation protocol, where complex oscillatory signal integration was inferred from phase–amplitude coupling of oscillatory signals between the primary visual cortex and the motion-sensitive medio-temporal area. Sixteen stroke patients were enrolled in a double-blind, randomized, cross-over trial, during which they performed two blocks of 10 daily training sessions of a direction discrimination task, combined with one of the two cross-frequency transcranial alternative brain stimulation (cf-tACS versus control cf-tACS) conditions.We found that the cf-tACS condition promoting feedforward visual inputs to the medio-temporal area significantly enhanced motion discrimination performance and shifted visual field borders (i.e. through localized enlargement of isopters). Behavioural improvements associated with a change in oscillatory activity within motion processing pathways were proportional to the amount of residual structural fibres along these pathways and perilesional primary visual cortex activity. In sum, we report, for the first time, that cf-tACS, a novel, pathway-specific, physiology-inspired brain stimulation approach, is able to boost the efficacy of perceptual training, restoring visual motion processing and reducing the severity of visual impairments in adult stroke patients. |
Renana Storm; Viktoria Wrobel; Antonia Frings; Andreas Sprenger; Christoph Helmchen In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Storm2025,Persistent postural-perceptual dizziness (PPPD) is often preceded by vestibular disorders. We applied galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) and related stimulus-evoked activity to individual ratings of perceived motion for each stimulus and to perceived egomotion thresholds by GVS and behavioural parameters outside the scanner: levels of functional disability by standardized questionnaires, visual motion coherence, passive egomotion perception by chair rotation and quantitative postural stability. We hypothesized that the preceding vestibular disorder predisposes to abnormal brain excitability by vestibular stimulation. All participants showed normal vestibular function tests on quantitative testing. GVS with different intensities was applied to 28 patients and 28 age- and gender-matched healthy participants (HC) in the scanner. After each stimulus, participants rated their perceived level of egomotion. GVS perception threshold was significantly lower in PPPD patients. Contrasting stimulus-identical GVS against a sham stimulus, group comparison revealed a stronger activation in the patient's supramarginal gyrus, insular cortex (operculum 3), and vermis. This stronger excitability was not related to the individual threshold of perceived egomotion by GVS. Patients rated GVS-evoked egomotion intensity by identical GVS intensities larger than HC but neural activity did not correlate with individual ratings of perceived egomotion by GVS. As GVS evoked larger egomotion and larger brain activation in patients, the ratio of brain activity to egomotion perception was not different between groups. GVS-evoked insular activity increased with the level of PPPD-related disability and postural imbalance. The larger activation in multisensory cortical vestibular network indicates a sensitization to vestibular stimuli eliciting egomotion perception which increases with levels of PPPD disability. It seems to reflect a sensory-neural amplification rather than an abnormal sensory-perceptual scaling. |
Michaël Vanhoyland; Peter Janssen; Tom Theys Single-neuron correlates of visual consciousness in human lateral occipital complex Journal Article In: Nature Communications, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 1–17, 2025. @article{Vanhoyland2025,Conscious perception, a critical aspect of human cognition, is assumed to emerge from a complex network of interacting brain regions that transmit information via feedforward and recurrent pathways. This study presents single- and multiunit recordings from the human lateral occipital complex (LO), a key region for shape and object recognition, during three distinct perceptual paradigms: backward masking, flash suppression and binocular rivalry. Stimulus awareness increased decoding accuracy and decoders assigned higher probabilities to the consciously perceived stimulus during periods of dichoptic stimulus presentation. These findings highlight the intricate neural mechanisms underlying visual awareness and show that LO responses predominantly align with subjective phenomenology, offering new insights into the neural correlates of visual consciousness. |
Carla A. Wall; Kayla Smith; Frederick Shic; Bridgette Kelleher; Abigail Hogan; Elizabeth A. Will; Jane E. Roberts Heart rate defined sustained attention relates to visual attention in autism and fragile X syndrome Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–9, 2025. @article{Wall2025b,Social attention, including shared attention and social orienting, is essential for positive social interactions. Although early visual social attention is often quantified using eye tracking, these indices may not consistently reflect cognitive engagement. Heart rate defined sustained attention (HRDSA) is a physiological measure that can index cognitive engagement alongside visual attention, leading to more comprehensive assessments of attentional processes that are particularly important in young, neurodiverse children with high support needs, including those with autism and fragile X syndrome (FXS). The present study examined visual and heart-defined measures of social attention to the Selective Social Attention task, a video-based assay of social attention, in children with autism, FXS, and neurotypical development. Linear mixed models examined group and condition effects in multiple cardiac indices and overall looking at the scene. Findings suggest that, overall, children across all groups engaged similarly across the experiment in most dimensions of HRDSA, and consistent with previous work, autistic children spent less time visually attending to the scene than either other group. HRDSA was positively associated with visual social attention. Combining physiological and visual attention measures may elucidate the complex nature of social attention and be especially valuable for neurodiverse children when typical assessments are inaccessible. |
Sara Jane Webb; Brian Kwan; Raphael Bernier; Katarzyna Charwarska; Geraldine Dawson; James Dziura; Susan Faja; Gerhard Hellmann; Shafali Jeste; Natalia Kleinhans; April Levin; Adam Naples; Maura Sabatos-DeVito; Damla Şentürk; Frederick Shic; Catherine Sugar; James C. McPartland; Autism Biomarkers Consortium for Clinical Trials Face perception, attention, and memory as predictors of social change in autistic children Journal Article In: Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 1–9, 2025. @article{Webb2025,Objective: Social perception and attention markers have been identified that, on average, differentiate autistic from non-autistic children. However, little is known about how these markers predict behavior over time at both short and long time intervals. Methods: We conducted a large multisite, naturalistic study of 6- to 11-year-old children diagnosed with ASD (n = 214). We evaluated three markers of social processing: social perception via the ERP N170 Latency to Upright Faces; social attention via the Eye Tracking (ET) OMI (Oculomotor Index of Gaze to Human Faces) that captures percent looking to faces from three tasks; and social cognition via the NEPSY Face Memory task. Each was evaluated in predicting social ability and autistic social behaviors derived from parental interviews and questionnaires about child behavior at + 6 months (T3) and + 4 years (T4). Results: Adjusting for baseline performance, time between measurements, age, and sex, our results suggest differential prognostic relations for each of the markers. The ERP N170 Latency to Upright Faces showed limited prognostic relations, with a significant relation to short term changes in face memory. The ET OMI was related to face memory over both short and long term. Both the ET OMI and Face Memory predicted long-term autistic social behavior scores. Conclusions: In the context of a large-scale, rigorous evaluation of candidate markers for use in future clinical trials, our primary markers had significant but small-effect prognostic capability. The ET OMI and Face Memory showed significant long-term predictive relations, with increased visual attention to faces and better face memory at baseline related to increased social approach and decreased autistic social behaviors 4 years later. |
Hanliang Wei; Tak Lam; Weijian Liu; Waxun Su; Zheng Wang; Qiandong Wang; Xiao Lin; Peng Li Initial and sustained attentional bias toward emotional faces in patients with major depressive disorder Journal Article In: Journal of Eye Movement Research, vol. 18, no. 6, pp. 72, 2025. @article{Wei2025,Major depressive disorder (MDD) represents a prevalent mental health condition characterized by prominent attentional biases, particularly toward negative stimuli. While extensive research has established the significance of negative attentional bias in depression, critical gaps remain in understanding the temporal dynamics and valence-specificity of these biases. This study employed eye-tracking technology to systematically examine the attentional processing of emotional faces (happy, fearful, sad) in MDD patients (n = 61) versus healthy controls (HC |
Jackie Wai Yi Wo; Weiyan Liao; Janet Hui Hsiao Impact of mask use on facial emotion recognition in individuals with subclinical social anxiety: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1–18, 2025. @article{Wo2025,Previous studies suggested that social anxiety is associated with interpretation bias, theory of mind deficit, and eye gaze avoidance when identifying facial emotions. We tested the hypothesis that socially anxious individuals would be more affected by mask use during facial emotion recognition. 88 healthy undergraduates with various levels of social anxiety were invited. Participants judged the emotions of masked and unmasked facial expressions. Eye Movement Analysis with Hidden Markov Models was used to analyze participants' eye movement patterns during the task. Potential confounders including gender, depressive symptoms, stress, and executive planning ability were controlled for in the analyses. Results failed to support our hypothesis. Instead, higher social anxiety was associated with higher accuracy rates for angry and fearful faces and lower false alarm rates for sad faces. Eye movement patterns were similar across social anxiety levels. Interestingly, an exploratory moderation analysis revealed that an increase in using a more eye-centered strategy due to mask use was significantly associated with a larger drop in accuracy rate for fearful faces among individuals with higher social anxiety, while non-significantly associated with a smaller drop among individuals with lower social anxiety. Thus, our study indicates social anxiety, at least at subclinical levels, may be associated with a generally heightened sensitivity to negative emotions. However, such heightened sensitivity diminishes if they switch to a more eye-centered strategy when viewing masked facial emotions. Potential mechanisms and implications were discussed. |
Dominika Drcażyk; Anissa Rida; Marcus Missal What is the difference between an impulsive and a timed anticipatory movement? Journal Article In: eNeuro, vol. 12, no. 11, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Dra̧zyk2025,Imagine yourself in a car race waiting for the traffic light to go green. Impulsivity could push you to accelerate when the light is still red. In contrast, temporally guided anticipation could lead you to accelerate at the time the light goes green. Whether these two types of early responses rely on the same or different neural processes is an open question. This question was investigated using an oculomotor task where the delay between a warning and an imperative visual stimuli was predictable. The spatial uncertainty of the "go" signal was also varied. On average, 10% of experimental trials were associated with a response before the "go" signal ("early saccade"). After the offset of the warning stimulus, the latency distribution of early saccades was bimodal, with a first mode peaking after 200 ms (1st mode saccades) and a second one starting to build-up after 375 ms (2nd mode saccades). With increasing delay duration: the number of 1st mode responses decreased whereas the number of 2nd mode responses remained approximately constant; the latency and variance of 2nd mode saccades increased; the maximum velocity of 2nd mode responses decreased. In general, the amplitude of 2nd mode responses was larger. These results show that there are probably two independent processes taking place before an expected event: an unintentional release of inhibition evoking an impulsive 1st mode saccade and an anticipatory process leading to a 2nd mode saccade. |
Jon S. Guez; Bart Krekelberg Preemptive gain control in primary visual cortex Journal Article In: Current Biology, vol. 35, no. 21, pp. 5230–5237, 2025. @article{Guez2025,Neurons continuously adapt their response properties to their environment. In the visual cortex, this includes gain control processes such as contrast normalization, which matches neurons' limited dynamic response range to the prevailing contrasts. Contrast normalization converges to a state that is optimal for processing the current visual input but not for the new, unknown input that impinges on the retina after each eye movement. We hypothesized that this conflict between current (pre-saccadic) and future (post-saccadic) needs could be resolved by a preemptive reset of the contrast response function with every saccade. We investigated this hypothesis using multi-electrode array recordings in the primary visual cortex of the macaque monkey. As expected, exposure to high contrast during steady fixation led to reduced gain and a compressed contrast response function. In support of our preemptive gain control hypothesis, these gain changes were partially reversed during saccades, resulting in a contrast response function with a higher gain and a broader, more linear response range. Post-saccadic gain increases were accompanied by pre-saccadic gain decreases, which were anticorrelated, suggesting that a common mechanism underlies both changes. Our findings indicate that the ubiquitous biphasic peri-saccadic neural response is a signature of a pause-rebound mechanism that prepares for unknown future visual inputs by resetting the contrast response function. At the perceptual level, this leads us to reinterpret the pre-saccadic reduction in visual sensitivity (i.e., saccadic suppression) as a side effect of the beneficial signal-processing strategy of preemptive gain control. |
Laura Schwalm; Ralph Radach; Victor Kuperman The metrics of regressive saccades during reading in 13 written languages Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 236, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Schwalm2025,A well-documented phenomenon in research on eye movement control during reading is the systematic relationship between the landing positions of forward saccades and target word characteristics. However, the behaviour of regressive saccades, which move the eyes in the opposite direction, remains less explored. This study delves into the landing positions of regressive saccades, emphasizing the distinction between intra-word and inter-word regressions, across diverse languages. Using data from the MECO L1 project, which includes eye-tracking data from 589 participants across 13 languages, we scrutinize the precise landing positions of regressions vis-à-vis forward saccades. Our analysis shows a robust effect of launch distance on landing positions for progressive saccades, with undershoots increasing as launch distance grows and overshoots with shorter launch distances. In contrast, regressive inter-word saccades show only minimal variation in landing positions, typically landing near the centre of the target word regardless of launch distance or word length. Intra-word regressions, however, display a pattern similar to progressive saccades, where the landing position is influenced by launch distance, tending to overshoot the optimal viewing position as the launch site moves away from the word's end. This pattern is consistent across all languages. These findings support the notion of cross-linguistic universality in oculomotor control mechanisms during reading, particularly the precision of regressive saccades. They align with the spatial coding hypothesis, suggesting that precise spatial memory of word positions guides regressive saccades. |
Yiyang Wu; Xiangbin Teng; Yi Du Eye blinks synchronize with musical beats during music listening Journal Article In: PLoS Biology, vol. 23, no. 11, pp. 1–26, 2025. @article{Wu2025b,Auditory-motor synchronization, the alignment of body movements with rhythmic patterns in music, is a universal human behavior, yet its full scope remains incompletely understood. Through four experiments with 123 young nonmusicians, integrating eye-tracking, neurophysiological recordings, white matter structural imaging, and behavioral analysis, we reveal a previously unrecognized form of synchronization: spontaneous eye blinks synchronize with musical beats. Blinks robustly synchronized with beats across a range of tempi and independently of melodic cues. Electroencephalogram recordings revealed a dynamic correspondence between blink timing and neural beat tracking. Blink synchronization performance was linked to white matter microstructure variation in the left superior longitudinal fasciculus, a key sensorimotor pathway. Additionally, the strength of blink synchronization reflected the modulation of dynamic auditory attention. These findings establish blink synchronization as a novel behavioral paradigm, expanding the auditory-motor synchronization repertoire and highlighting the intricate interplay between music rhythms and oculomotor activity. This discovery underscores a cross-modal active sensing mechanism, offering new insights into embodied music perception, rhythm processing, and their potential clinical applications. |
Shimpei Yamagishi; Shigeto Furukawa Microsaccade direction reveals the variation in auditory selective attention processes Journal Article In: The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 45, no. 45, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Yamagishi2025,Selective spatial attention plays a critical role in perception in the daily environment where multiple sensory stimuli exist. Even covertly directing attention to a specific location facilitates the brain's information processing of stimuli at the attended location. Previous behavioral and neurophysiological studies have shown that microsaccades (MSs), tiny involuntary saccadic eye movements, reflect such a process in terms of visual space and can be a marker of spatial attention. However, it is unclear whether auditory spatial attention processes that are supposed to interact with visual attention processes influence MSs and vice versa. Here, we examine the relationship between MS direction and auditory spatial attention during dichotic oddball sound detection tasks with human participants of both sexes. The results showed that the MS direction was generally biased contralateral to the ear to which the oddball sound was presented or that to which sustained auditory attention was directed. The postoddball modulation of MS direction was associated with the behavioral performance of the detection task. The results suggest that the inhibition of stimulus-directed MSs occurs to reduce erroneous orientation of ocular responses during selective detection tasks. We also found that the correlation between MS direction and neural response to the tone originated from the auditory brainstem (frequency-following response). Overall, the present study suggests that MSs can be a marker of auditory spatial attention and that the auditory neural activity fluctuates over time with the states of attention and the oculomotor system, also involving auditory subcortical processes. |
Aimei Ye; Dan Zhang; Xu Liu; Lihua Xu; Yanyan Wei; Huiru Cui; Wensi Zheng; Yawen Hong; Jinyang Zhao; Yingying Tang; Min Su; Yong Ye; Yingli Huang; Tianhong Zhang; Jijun Wang Two-month antipsychotic exposure induces domain-specific eye movement alterations in clinical high-risk individuals Journal Article In: Schizophrenia Research, vol. 285, pp. 196–203, 2025. @article{Ye2025,Background: While antipsychotic-induced eye movement alterations are well-documented in schizophrenia, their effects during the clinical high-risk (CHR) phase remain uncharacterized. This study examined the effects of two-month antipsychotic treatment on eye movement parameters in CHR individuals and their association with clinical outcome. Methods: In this longitudinal cohort, 139 CHR individuals and 105 healthy controls completed baseline eye-tracking (fixation stability, free viewing, and smooth pursuit). CHR participants were reassessed at two months and followed for three years to track remission status. Linear mixed-effects models examined the effects of antipsychotic use, dose, and type on eye movement indicators, and a random forest model evaluated how changes in these indicators predicted clinical remission. Results: In the antipsychotic - treated subgroup, fixation stability featured more microsaccades, free viewing showed reduced saccade amplitude and velocity, and smooth pursuit showed increased velocity gain with reduced saccade amplitude, and these changes scaled with dose and varied by agent with the most pronounced effects for aripiprazole. A random forest classifier using two treatment-induced eye movement change values predicted 3-year clinical non-remission with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.80. Conclusions: Short-term antipsychotic exposure induced mixed eye movement alterations that were associated with non-remission at three-year follow-up. This finding provides a reference for the development of personalized risk stratification frameworks and targeted intervention strategies in CHR populations. |
Aner Zheng; Sang Chul Chong How location-based organization affects the extent of contextual cueing Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, vol. 87, no. 8, pp. 2370–2387, 2025. @article{Zheng2025,Contextual cueing describes the phenomenon where repeated associations between stimuli facilitate visual search performance. For example, previous research has demonstrated that when 12 repeated stimuli are organized into four color-based clusters, probing only the repeated cluster containing the target alongside nine randomly generated stimuli can elicit similar contextual cueing as probing all the stimuli. This suggests that feature-based attention, when directed by color, strengthens the associations between the target and distractors within the same cluster, making it the primary contributor to contextual cueing. However, the influence of location-based organization on contextual cueing is less clear. We hypothesized that when 12 repeated stimuli are evenly divided into four quadrants, location-based attention similarly strengthens the associations between the target and distractors within the same quadrant. Consequently, probing only the target-containing quadrant may produce similar contextual cueing to probing the entire configuration, whereas probing only three repeated stimuli without quadrant organization would not. Experiments 1 and 2 confirmed this hypothesis. To further investigate the effect of location-based attention, Experiment 3 manipulated the number of stimuli attended to simultaneously (i.e., the attentional scope). We hypothesized that a larger attentional scope enhances the associations between stimuli, thereby facilitating contextual cueing. The results support this hypothesis, indicating that a broader attentional scope led to more pronounced contextual cueing. In summary, the present study demonstrates that the extent of contextual cueing depends on location-based organization. |
Federica Conti; Hashim El-Omar; Her Teng; Rebekah M. Ahmed; Olivier Piguet; Muireann Irish The effect of congruency on visual exploration and episodic memory performance in Alzheimer's disease and semantic dementia Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, vol. 218, pp. 1–13, 2025. @article{Conti2025,Mounting evidence points to the role of semantic knowledge in modulating how we perceive, and subsequently remember, experiences. In healthy aging, prior knowledge becomes increasingly important to guide visual exploration during episodic encoding and retrieval and can hinder performance when incongruous with to-be-learned information. It remains unclear, however, how the dynamic integration of visual information and prior knowledge is altered in neurodegenerative disorders, and whether this impacts oculomotor behaviour. Here, we explored how degradation of the conceptual knowledge base in semantic dementia (SD) impacts the acquisition and retrieval of new information, and how such changes relate to oculomotor behaviour. Ten well-characterised cases of SD were compared to 12 disease-matched cases of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 24 healthy older Controls. Participants completed a visual search task followed by a surprise memory task where target objects were displayed in either semantically congruent or semantically incongruent locations. Oculomotor performance was evaluated by measuring the time participants spent exploring target congruent areas in each condition. Relative to Controls, visual search and memory performance was significantly compromised in AD, as indexed by slower response times, reduced task accuracy, and more extensive visual exploration directed towards target congruent areas. In contrast, SD patients scored in line with Controls for all behavioural and oculomotor measures on the visual search task when target objects were displayed in semantically incongruent locations. Overall, our findings suggest that degradation of the semantic and episodic memory systems in dementia differentially impacts visual exploration and memory retrieval depending on stimulus congruency. |
Matthew Lehet; Beier Yao; Ivy F. Tso; Vaibhav A. Diwadkar; Jessica Fattal; Jacqueline Bao; Katharine N. Thakkar Altered effective connectivity within a thalamocortical corollary discharge network in individuals with schizophrenia Journal Article In: Schizophrenia Bulletin, vol. 51, no. 6, pp. 1637–1650, 2025. @article{Lehet2025,Study Design: Here, we modeled fMRI data using dy- namic causal modeling (DCM) to examine patient-control differences in effective connectivity evoked by a double-step (DS) task (30 SZ, 29 HC). The interrogated network was formed from a combination of (1) functionally identified FEF and IPS regions that robustly responded on DS trials and (2) anatomically identified thalamic regions involved in CD transmission. We also examined the relationship between clinical symptoms and effective connectivity parameters associated with task modulation of network pathways. Study Results: Network connectivity was indeed modulated by the DS task, which involves CD transmission. More importantly, we found reduced effective connectivity from thalamus to IPS in SZ, which was further correlated with passivity symptom severity. Conclusions: These results reaffirm the importance of IPS and thalamocortical connections in oculomotor CD signaling and provide mechanistic insights into CD alterations and consequently agency disturbances in schizophrenia. |
Guido Maiello; Arezoo Pooresmaeili; Jayne Morriss; Lois Howsley; Emma Deverill; Haden Dewis; Hayward J. Godwin Fixation termination during visual search with simulated visual impairments Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Psychology, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Maiello2025,Everyday tasks such as finding a friend in a crowd rely on efficient visual search, a process that heavily relies on efficiently executing eye movements. But how does our visual system adapt eye movement behavior when visual input is degraded? Here, we investigated whether eye movement behaviour during visual search adjusts to simulated visual impairments. Participants performed a visual search task whilst their eye movement behaviour was recorded under three conditions: normal vision (control), monocular vision (with an eye patch over the dominant eye), and low-contrast vision (with reduced stimulus contrast). Overall, we found that search was slowed under conditions of simulated visual impairments, with increases in RTs, fixation durations, and time to fixate the target compared with a control condition. Our results provide further support for mixed-control models of fixation termination and have implications for understanding eye movement control under visual impairments. |
Raju Sapkota; Monika McAtarsney-Kovacs; Ian Linde; Shahina Pardhan In: Brain and Behavior, vol. 15, no. 11, pp. 1–11, 2025. @article{Sapkota2025,Background: We compared the accuracy of eye movements in locating an item stored in visual short-term memory between young healthy adults, normally aging older adults, and older adults with mild cognitive impairment as indicated by the Montreal Cognitive Assessment or Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination-III test. Methods: Thirty-three young healthy adults, 38 normally aging older adults, and 17 older adults indicative of MCI completed two experiments requiring object-location binding. In Experiment 1, participants viewed 2–4 memory items displayed sequentially at random screen locations. Following a 900 ms interval, eye movements were recorded while participants moved their eyes to the location of the memory item corresponding to a displayed cue. In Experiment 2 (control), participants indicated whether or not the test item was shown at its original location using a yes/no response. Results: MCI-indicative participants exhibited greater saccadic error (spatial deviation of saccadic endpoint from the remembered target location) than normally aging older (p = 0.002) and young (p < 0.001) participants at low memory load only. At higher memory load, the saccadic error distance was greater for all groups (p < 0.001). Moreover, in Experiment 2, MCI-indicative participants exhibited significantly poorer memory performance than normally aging older adults, but only at lower memory load (p = 0.02). Conclusion: Saccadic accuracy declined with memory load for all groups. The MCI-indicative group showed lower saccadic accuracy versus normally aging older and young adults at low memory load. The findings offer important insights into our understanding of saccadic eye movement as a potential behavioral marker for MCI. |
Alexander J. Shackman; Jason F. Smith; Ryan D. Orth; Christina L. G. Savage; Paige R. Didier; Julie M. McCarthy; Melanie E. Bennett; Jack J. Blanchard Blunted ventral striatal reactivity to social reward is associated with more severe motivation and pleasure deficits in psychosis Journal Article In: Schizophrenia Bulletin, vol. 51, no. 6, pp. 1620–1636, 2025. @article{Shackman2025,Background and Hypothesis: Among individuals living with psychotic disorders, social impairment is common, debilitating, and challenging to treat. While the roots of this impairment are undoubtedly complex, converging lines of evidence suggest that social motivation and pleasure (MAP) deficits play a central role. Yet most neuroimaging studies have focused on monetary rewards, precluding decisive inferences. Study Design: Here we leveraged parallel social and monetary incentive delay functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigms to test whether blunted reactivity to social incentives in the ventral striatum - a key component of the distributed neural circuit mediating appetitive motivation and hedonic pleasure - is associated with more severe MAP symptoms in a transdiagnostic adult sample enriched for psychosis. To maximize ecological validity and translational relevance, we capitalized on naturalistic audiovisual clips of an established social partner expressing positive feedback. Study Results: Although both paradigms robustly engaged the ventral striatum, only reactivity to social incentives was associated with clinician-rated MAP deficits. This association remained significant when controlling for other symptoms, binary diagnostic status, or striatal reactivity to monetary incentives. Follow-up analyses suggested that this association predominantly reflects diminished activation during the presentation of social reward. Conclusions These observations provide a neurobiologically grounded framework for conceptualizing the social-anhedonia symptoms and social impairments that characterize many individuals living with psychotic disorders and underscore the need to develop targeted intervention strategies. |
Nikita Thomas; Jennifer H. Acton; Jonathan T. Erichsen; James Fergusson; Nick White; Matt J. Dunn The human fovea is relatively horizontally elongated in infantile nystagmus Journal Article In: Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, vol. 66, no. 14, pp. 1–9, 2025. @article{Thomas2025,PURPOSE. Infantile nystagmus (IN) is characterized by primarily horizontal, repetitive eye movements. IN develops in the first few months of life, in tandem with the postnatal development of the fovea. This study tested the hypothesis that the foveal pit is horizontally elongated in adults with IN, corresponding to the streak of the retina over which the image constantly oscillates. METHODS. In 12 adults with IN (without associated conditions known to affect the fovea) and 12 healthy controls (age, sex, and ethnicity-matched), horizontal and vertically-orientated foveal images were acquired with a long-wavelength (λc 1040 nm) optical coherence tomography system. Horizontal and vertical foveal pit diameters were measured and the ratio between them (foveal shape factor). RESULTS. Foveal shape factor (vertical/horizontal pit diameter ratio) was significantly lower (more horizontal) in participants with IN compared to controls (0.89 vs. 0.96 |
Micaela Wiseman; Rachel Yep; Madeline Wood Alexander; Christopher B. Pople; Lucas Perri; Georgia Gopinath; Maria Vasileiadi; Jessica Robin; Michael J. Spilka; William Simpson; Yana Yunusova; Douglas P. Munoz; Brian C. Coe; Donald Brien; Sean Nestor; Nir Lipsman; Peter Giacobbe; Jennifer S. Rabin Objective speech measures capture depressive symptoms and associated cognitive difficulties Journal Article In: Translational Psychiatry, pp. 1–9, 2025. @article{Wiseman2025,Psychiatry lacks objective biomarkers for assessing depression, relying instead on subjective measures, such as the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD-17). This study examined whether speech features could serve as objective markers of depressive symptoms and its associated cognitive difficulties. Sixty-six individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) and 54 non-depressed control participants completed a speech assessment, responding to the prompt: “Please tell me how you are feeling today.” Linguistic (valence, emotional intensity, agency) and acoustic (pitch, pitch variance, speech rate, time spent pausing) features were derived from natural language processing. These speech features were analyzed individually and collectively as a composite score representing overall speech disturbance. A subset of participants (40 with MDD, 38 controls) also completed a validated executive function task. ANCOVA models compared speech features between groups. Linear regression models examined associations between speech features, depression severity (HAMD-17), and performance on an executive function task. Compared to controls, individuals with MDD used language that was more negatively valenced, emotionally intense, and less agentic. They also demonstrated lower pitch, slower speech rate, and more time spent pausing. The composite speech score also differed between groups. Speech features and executive function were not associated with depression severity, as measured by the HAMD-17. However, several speech features were associated with executive function. Taken together, these findings suggest that speech features may provide a scalable, objective method for detecting depressive symptoms and associated executive difficulties. |
Omar Bachtoula; Mel Ellul Miraval; Ignacio Serrano-Pedraza; David Souto Multiple mechanisms of response suppression to self-induced sensation during pursuit eye movements Journal Article In: Royal Society Open Science, vol. 12, no. 10, pp. 1–14, 2025. @article{Bachtoula2025,Eye movements generate a perceptual challenge, that of distinguishing self-induced sensations from movement in the world. We ask about the mechanisms involved in suppressing eye movements towards self-induced sensation, ensuring visual stability. When tracking with the eyes an object moving against a textured background, the background retinal image moves in the opposite direction to the smooth pursuit eye movement. Optokinetic responses, such as optokinetic nystagmus or ocular tracking to this reafferent signal, must be suppressed to sustain the pursuit of the object of interest. We varied the contrast of a brief background motion signal to tell apart two plausible accounts of the suppression of optokinesis during pursuit; a visuomotor gain modulation account, which predicts that ocular tracking of background motion is suppressed in the same proportion irrespective of contrast, and a sensory attenuation account, which predicts that larger contrasts are needed to elicit the same response. Unexpectedly, neither account fit ocular tracking in the reafferent signal direction. The combination of contrast-dependent gating, with maximal suppression observed with higher contrasts, and either contrast gain or visuomotor gain modulation, provides a good fit for most observers' data. Contrast-dependent gating promotes visuomotor stability in response to most salient signals, as a likely adaptation to the statistics of the environment. |
Jan W. Brascamp; Bobicheng Zhang; Vasili Marshev Fixational saccade inhibition and pupil dilation during self-paced limb movement preparation Journal Article In: PLoS One, vol. 20, pp. 1–17, 2025. @article{Brascamp2025,Fixational saccades are modulated in anticipation of several kinds of stimuli and motor actions, suggesting that they can form an overt marker of preparatory state. However, no existing work has studied fixational saccades ahead of spontaneous limb movements in the absence of sensory stimuli, in order to isolate motor preparation from other anticipatory processes (e.g., those related to stimulus processing). Here we examined fixational saccades while participants made self-paced hand and foot movements. We observed that fixational saccade rate steadily dropped prior to either kind of motor action, and recovered immediately after. To examine the relation between this fixational saccade rate signal and other known signals that precede volitional action, we analyzed how this signal related to anticipatory pupil size changes in the same dataset. Replicating previous work, we found steady pupil dilation ahead of limb movements, followed by rapid re-constriction. The amplitude of this pupil signal covaried across individual limb movements with that of the fixational saccade rate signal. The pupil modulations, moreover, followed too shortly after the accompanying fixational saccade rate modulations to be caused by saccade-induced changes in visual input. Together, these observations suggest a joint neural factor influencing both fixational saccade rate and pupil size ahead of limb movements. We discuss possible interpretations of our findings, both specific ones that center on processes of motor planning or temporal expectation, and more general ones that are in terms effort. |
Maria Z. Chroneos; Marlene Behrmann; J. Patrick Mayo Bidirectional and asymmetric smooth pursuit deficits in childhood hemispherectomy patients Journal Article In: Cortex, vol. 191, pp. 266–282, 2025. @article{Chroneos2025,The neural circuitry engaged in supporting eye movements has been well characterized, but fundamental questions remain about the necessity and sufficiency of the individual hemispheric contributions. To gain a better understanding of the neural correlates of oculomotor control, we measured horizontal smooth pursuit tracking behavior in 14 patients following childhood hemispherectomy. Relative to developmentally typical age-matched controls, patients exhibited a bilateral and asymmetric pursuit deficit with reduced ipsilesional but elevated contralesional eye speeds, and asymmetric accompanying ‘catch up' saccades. The atypical pursuit behavior could not be explained by a sensory deficit associated with their hemianopia, as patients adjusted their eye position to maintain visibility of the target. The pursuit deficit was also not accounted for by a general motor impairment as patients made faster catch-up saccades than controls, particularly in the ipsilesional direction. These results, all of which hold irrespective of whether the right or left hemisphere is resected, demonstrate that patients can compensate for reduced pursuit speeds by modulating their saccade characteristics. Overall, this study represents the most comprehensive characterization of smooth pursuit disturbances in hemispherectomy patients. Our results elucidate: 1) the competence of a single hemisphere for generating pursuit and compensatory behaviors; 2) the lack of a hemispheric bias supporting pursuit given large-scale cortical disruptions; and 3) that intact horizontal pursuit likely requires the interaction of brain circuitry across both hemispheres. |
Joanita F. D'souza; Jessima M. Rich; Shaun L. Cloherty; Nicholas S. C. Price; Maureen A. Hagan Topographic organization of saccade-related response field properties in the marmoset posterior parietal cortex Journal Article In: eNeuro, vol. 12, no. 10, pp. 1–12, 2025. @article{Dsouza2025,Despite various histological, electrophysiological, and imaging studies, the topographic organization of saccade-related activity in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) has been notoriously difficult to characterize. In part, this is because areas of interest in PPC are often embedded deep in sulci in macaques and humans. Understanding the extent of topographic organization in PPC can provide insights into the computation contributions of PPC. The lissencephalic cortex of the common marmoset offers a unique opportunity to investigate fine-scale topographic organization in PPC. Recordings were obtained from the PPC of two male marmosets performing a visually guided center-out saccade task with 8 or 36 peripheral targets using multichannel electrode arrays with 100 μm spacing. By plotting the pattern of saccade direction tuning preferences across all penetrations and cortical depths, we uncovered topographic organizational features within the PPC. Like other primates, multiunits in marmoset PPC tend to prefer saccade targets in the contralateral visual field. The results detail how preference for saccadic direction changes in a systematic manner across cortical distance, such that response units closer in proximity tend to show systematic changes in their tuning preferences. Across cortical distance, the visual field was also systematically encoded but reversals in direction varied across penetrations. The analysis highlights the likelihood of multiple representations of the visual field for saccade direction preference across PPC. These novel findings suggest a possible functional organization of saccade-related activity in marmoset PPC, giving insights into the computational capacity of the PPC. |