抄録
Recent studies have indicated that mechanisms of microsaccades, involuntary small shifts in gaze, are affected by attention. Most studies have shown that mocrosaccade rates increase with a shift of attention, while others have shown that occurrence of mocrosaccades is inhibited when attention is in foveal region. In this study, we calculated latencies of microsaccades and analyzed the relationship between the spatial extent of attention and latencies of microsaccades. Subjects performed rapid serial visual presentation tasks. Targets were defined by differences in luminance contrast from distractors. We controlled focal attention under two conditions: high-contrast (HC) and low-contrast (LC). Results show that the histogram of latencies of microsaccades have two peaks only in the LC. The second peak was delayed approximately 0.3 sec from the peak of the HC. These results suggest that microsaccades are inhibited when attention is concentrated in foveal region, and disinhibited when attention is disengaged.
