Eye movements are made to the centre of gravity of texture-defined targets.

Publisher: Elsevier Science Ltd Country of Publication: England NLM ID: 0417402 Publication Model: Print-Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1878-5646 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 00426989 NLM ISO Abbreviation: Vision Res Subsets: MEDLINE

Publication: Kidlington, Oxford : Elsevier Science Ltd.
Original Publication: Oxford [etc.]

Eye Movements* ; Saccades*; Humans ; Reaction Time

Saccadic localisation of targets of various properties has been extensively studied, but rarely for texture-defined figures. In this paper, three experiments that investigate the way information from a texture target is processed in order to provide a signal for eye movement control are presented. Participants made saccades to target regions embedded in a background structure, and the saccade landing position and latency were measured. The textures comprised line elements, with orientations of the lines configured to form the figure and ground. Various orientation profile configurations (Block, Blur, and Cornsweet), were used in order to measure the role of edge profiles in driving eye movements and producing salience. We found that in all cases the visual system is in fact able to effectively segregate a texture figure from the ground in order to accurately plan a saccade to the target-figure. While saccadic latency was the highest for the Blur profile, the mean saccadic landing position was mostly unaffected by the various profiles (Experiment 1). More specifically, we showed that saccades were directed to the centre-of-gravity of the target (Experiment 2). We also found that figures with information of orientation contrast at both the edge and centre of figure (i.e. Block) produced the highest level of saliency in attracting eye movements (Experiment 3). Overall, the results show that saccades are planned on the representation of the whole target shape rather than a local salient region based on orientation contrast cues, and that the various texture profiles were important only to the extent that they affected the time to programme a saccade.
Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Keywords: Eye Movements; Figure-ground segregation; Orientation-defined texture targets; Saccade position; Saccadic reaction time; Texture Segregation

Date Created: 20230605 Date Completed: 20230717 Latest Revision: 20231116

20231117

10.1016/j.visres.2023.108264

37276684