ArticleScientific reports2020
Sustained spatial attention accounts for the direction bias of human microsaccades.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- Microsaccade Direction Reveals the Variation in Auditory Selective Attention Processes.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Stimulus representations in visual cortex shaped by spatial attention and microsaccades.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Attentional shifts bias microsaccade direction but do not cause new microsaccades.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Do microsaccades vary with discriminability around the visual field?Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Do microsaccades vary with discriminability around the visual field?bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Microsaccades reflect attention shifts: a mini review of 20 years of microsaccade research.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Visual perceptual learning modulates microsaccade rate and directionality.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Reply to van Ede: Pulling on the threads of microsaccades and attention: What's left?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Microsaccades are directed toward the midpoint between targets in a variably cued attention task.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Microsaccades as a long-term oculomotor correlate in visual perceptual learning.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
- Depression and Cognitive Impairment: Current Understanding of Its Neurobiology and Diagnosis.Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment · 2022Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Small ballistic eye movements, so called microsaccades, occur even while foveating an object. Previous studies using covert attention tasks have shown that shortly after a symbolic spatial cue, specifying a behaviorally relevant location, microsaccades tend to be directed toward the cued location. This suggests that microsaccades can serve as an index for the covert orientation of spatial attention. However, this hypothesis faces two major challenges: First, effects associated with visual spatial attention are hard to distinguish from those that associated with the contemplation of foveating a peripheral stimulus. Second, it is less clear whether endogenously sustained attention alone can bias microsaccade directions without a spatial cue on each trial. To address the first issue, we investigated the direction of microsaccades in human subjects while they attended to a behaviorally relevant location and prepared a response eye movement either toward or away from this location. We find that directions of microsaccades are biased toward the attended location rather than towards the saccade target. To tackle the second issue, we verbally indicated the location to attend before the start of each block of trials, to exclude potential visual cue-specific effects on microsaccades. Our results indicate that sustained spatial attention alone reliably produces the microsaccade direction effect. Overall, our findings demonstrate that sustained spatial attention alone, even in the absence of saccade planning or a spatial cue, is sufficient to explain the direction bias observed in microsaccades.
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