Eye Movement Flashcards
why do we move our eyes
- to bring points of interest over the fovea
- to prevent blurring of the visual scene
what are the types of eye movement
- fast
- saccades - brings the area of interest onto the fovea
- resetting of eye position during VOR and OKR
- slow
- vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR)
- optokinetic reflex (OKR)
- smooth pursuit - tracks moving objects
- vergence - point the eyes in the same direction
what are saccades
- ballistic
- up to 900deg/s
- last 40-200ms (too fast for sensory feedback)
- roughly 3 saccades per second
- more frequent than heart beats
- ~10% of waking hours spent making saccades
- two types
- reflex (stimulus driven)
- voluntary (no stimulus necessary)
- vision actively suppressed during a saccade
- try seeing your eyes move in the mirror; you can’t
- observing a scene is characterised by alternating fixate and saccade pattern
- fixations last roughly 300ms
- saccadic eye movements useful for revealing cognitive and motor processes
what are corrective saccades
normal saccadic eye movements often characterised by slight undershoot followed by a corrective saccade
what are dysmetric saccades
- the cerebellum is important in tuning the gain of saccadic eye movements
- dysmetric saccades cause visual problems in cerebellar patients
what is the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR)
- 3 semicircular canals - detect head rotation
- 2 otolith organs - detect tilt (gravity) and linear acceleration
- rotates the eyes to compensate for head movement
- helps to stabilise the visual image
- often need to suppress VOR
- basic brainstem circuit with only 3 neurons
- therefore very fast (~15ms from head to eye movement)
how do you test for VOR function
- rotation in darkness used to test VOR function
- provides an alternating pattern of fast and slow eye movements called Nystagmus
- quick phase (saccades) resets the position of the eye in the head
- if the VOR is working perfectly, the slow phase eye rotation and head rotation should cancel out
- thus equates to a ‘gain’ of 1
- VOR gain may be less than 1 if the vestibular apparatus is damaged
how is VOR adapted
- different relationship between head and scene movement requires different VOR again
- adaptation can be demonstrated experimentally with rotating chair and curtain
- also happens in ‘real life’ - if you get a stronger pair of glasses, you need to adapt to your VOR
- cerebellar disease impairs VOR adaptation
what happens when VOR goes wrong
- anything which affects vestibular function can compromise the VOR
- vestibular loss: e.g. viral infection, head injury, surgical intervention. symptoms include loss of balance, disorientation and oscillopsia (blurring of visual field)
- ageing: vestibular hair cells are gradually lost with age
- alcohol: alcohol nystagmus caused by changes in specific gravity of the fluid in the canals - hence the spinning room sensation
what is the optokinetic reflex
- OKN performs similar function to VOR but visually driven
- better for low frequency movements, whereas the VOR is adapted to high frequency
what is velocity storage mechanism
- during continuous rotation, the vestibular signal delays away much earlier than the eye movement (6s versus 15s time constant)
- the brainstem has a ‘velocity storage’ mechanism to prolong gaze stabilisation
- however, during prolonged rotation this signal ultimately fails - this is when the optokinetic reflex takes over (assuming vision is available)
what is smooth pursuit
- ability to track a moving object with the eye
- pursuit must involve prediction - visual feedback is too slow
- hence the brain must predict the future flight of the object
- eyes continue moving after object disappears
what is vergence
- ability to direct eyes toward the same point
- disordered vergence may underlive some types of dyslexia
what are the methods of eye tracking
- scleral oil
- contact lens with embedded wire coils
- infrared reflectance
- beam of infrared reflected from cornea
- electro-oculography (EOG)
- retina produces measurable electric charge
- video-oculography (VOG)
- use software to track pupil and / or reflection
what is the scleral coil
- very accurate eye position in all 3 axes - yaw, pitch and roll
- however, very uncomfortable and invasive (wire can scratch cornea)
what is infrared reflectance
- as the eye rotates the beam is reflected in a different direction
- this change in position is detected by the IR detector
- can be used in the dark
what is electrooculography (EOG)
- permanent potential difference between the cornea and retina
- this sets up an electrical field in the surrounding tissue which we can measure
- as the eye rotates, the voltage between each pair of electrodes changes
- can measure horizontal and vertical eye movement
- commonly used in neurology clinics to test VOR function (cheap, easy and reliable)
- works with the eyes closed
- can provide gaze information, if head is stationary
what is video oculography and gaze tracking
simultaneous recording of the eye and scene allows point of gaze to be tracked
how does gaze anticipate movements
eye movements tend to precede object manipulation by ~0.6s, moving on to the next object ~0.6s before the action is completed
how does gaze position affected during locomotion
- when walking in difficult terrain, gaze typically stays 2 steps ahead
- roughly 2 fixations per step
- hence, foot placement is generally planned around 2 steps in advance
- older adults end to show more predictive sampling, at the expense of the current step
what is action observation
- when observing movement, gaze is predictive not reactive. mimics the gaze pattern observed when actually moving
- supports the hypothesis that action understanding is based on a direct matching mechanism that maps the visual representation of the observed action onto a motor representation of the same action