ArticleJournal of neurophysiology2016
Looking for symmetry: fixational eye movements are biased by image mirror symmetry.
Article in Journal of neurophysiology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mid-level perceptual features, and not ambiguity, accelerate access to awareness.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- How good are medical students and researchers in detecting duplications in digital images from research articles: a cross-sectional survey.Research integrity and peer review · 2025Article
- Foraging with your eyes: a novel task to study cognitive strategies involved in (visual) foraging behaviour.Cognitive processing · 2025Article
- The role of contour polarity, objectness, and regularities in haptic and visual perception.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2018Article
- Temporal dynamics of mirror-symmetry perception.Journal of vision · 2018Article
- Spontaneous Ocular Scanning of Visual Symmetry Is Similar During Classification and Evaluation Tasks.i-PerceptionArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans are highly sensitive to symmetry. During scene exploration, the area of the retina with dense light receptor coverage acquires most information from relevant locations determined by gaze fixation. We characterized patterns of fixational eye movements made by observers staring at synthetic scenes either freely (i.e., free exploration) or during a symmetry orientation discrimination task (i.e., active exploration). Stimuli could be mirror-symmetric or not. Both free and active exploration generated more saccades parallel to the axis of symmetry than along other orientations. Most saccades were small (<2°), leaving the fovea within a 4° radius of fixation. Analysis of saccade dynamics showed that the observed parallel orientation selectivity emerged within 500 ms of stimulus onset and persisted throughout the trials under both viewing conditions. Symmetry strongly distorted existing anisotropies in gaze direction in a seemingly automatic process. We argue that this bias serves a functional role in which adjusted scene sampling enhances and maintains sustained sensitivity to local spatial correlations arising from symmetry.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.