Microsaccade-rate indicates absorption by music listening.

The power of music is a literary topos, which can be attributed to intense and personally significant experiences, one of them being the state of absorption. Such phenomenal states are difficult to grasp objectively. We investigated the state of musical absorption by using eye tracking.

Revising the link between microsaccades and the spatial cueing of voluntary attention.

Microsaccades - i.e., small fixational saccades generated in the superior colliculus (SC) - have been linked to spatial attention.

Small saccades versus microsaccades: Experimental distinction and model-based unification.

Natural vision is characterized by alternating sequences of rapid gaze shifts (saccades) and fixations. During fixations, microsaccades and slower drift movements occur spontaneously, so that the eye is never motionless. Theoretical models of fixational eye movements predict that microsaccades are dynamically coupled to slower drift movements generated immediately before microsaccades, which might be used as a criterion to distinguish microsaccades from small voluntary saccades.

An integrated model of fixational eye movements and microsaccades.

When we fixate a stationary target, our eyes generate miniature (or fixational) eye movements involuntarily. These fixational eye movements are classified as slow components (physiological drift, tremor) and microsaccades, which represent rapid, small-amplitude movements. Here we propose an integrated mathematical model for the generation of slow fixational eye movements and microsaccades.

Saccadic facilitation by modulation of microsaccades in natural backgrounds.

Saccades move objects of interest into the center of the visual field for high-acuity visual analysis. White, Stritzke, and Gegenfurtner (Current Biology, 18, 124-128, 2008) have shown that saccadic latencies in the context of a structured background are much shorter than those with an unstructured background at equal levels of visibility. This effect has been explained by possible preactivation of the saccadic circuitry whenever a structured background acts as a mask for potential saccade targets.