Cognitive psychological study on the occurrence of microsaccades in visual spatial attention

Although it is well known about the position of attention in many cases from the gaze, the covert attention which showed that attention and position of gaze may different is still not clear. In order to understand where people are paying attention, it is necessary to think from something other than gaze information. Microsaccades are rapid eye movements that occur with extremely fine amplitude within fixation microtremor. Therefore, Microsaccades can be used there, as it is likely to occur when a stimulus is presented in the direction. However, since the relationship between spatial attention and microsaccades has not been studied sufficiently, we also confirmed spatial attention and microsaccades incidence by using classical posner task in this study. As a result, it was confirmed that there was a significant difference in reaction time when the viewing angle was 7 deg. Further comparison showed that the response time with valid conditions were significant faster than that with invalid conditions. However, no significant difference was found at a viewing angle of 20 deg, which might relate with the presentation rate. Therefore, it became clear that there is relevance to the occurrence frequency of microsaccades and the presence or absence of spatial attention.