Which neural pathway supports the microsaccadic response to visual stimuli?
” Perception 36 ECVP Abstract Supplement Which neural pathway supports the microsaccadic response to visual stimuli? M Valsecchi, M Turatto When a stimulus appears at fixation, the microsaccadic frequency is first inhibited, and then undergoes a rebound before returning to the baseline (approximately 1 Hz). There is evidence that such response changes dramatically when the stimulus is an oddball, indicating that high-order cognitive processes, rather than a simple reflex, control the microsaccadic response. The present study aimed at isolating the relative contribution of cortical and retino-collicular pathways in controlling microsaccades. We used an oddball task in which the stimuli were either equiluminant with the background (ie invisible to the superior colliculus, SC) or consisted of a luminance change. The microsaccadic response elicited by equiluminant stimuli was indistinguishable from that evoked by non-equiluminant ones. The only crucial difference was a delayed (34 ms) micr
