Microsaccadic modulation evoked by emotional events
- PDF / 1,350,465 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 70 Downloads / 173 Views
(2020) 39:26
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Open Access
Microsaccadic modulation evoked by emotional events Koji Kashihara1,2
Abstract Saccadic eye movements can allude to emotional states and visual attention. Recent studies have shown that microsaccadic responses (i.e., small fixational eye movements) reflect advanced brain activity during attentional and cognitive tasks. Moreover, the microsaccadic activity related to emotional attention provides new insights into this field. For example, emotional pictures attenuate the microsaccadic rate, and microsaccadic responses to covert attention occur in the direction opposite to a negative emotional target. However, the effects of various emotional events on microsaccadic activity remain debatable. This review introduces visual attention and eye movement studies that support findings on the modulation of microsaccadic responses to emotional events, comparing them with typical microsaccadic responses. This review also discusses the brain neuronal mechanisms governing microsaccadic responses to the attentional shifts triggered by emotion-related stimuli. It is hard to reveal the direct brain pathway of the microsaccadic modulation, especially in advanced (e.g., sustained anger, envy, distrust, guilt, frustration, delight, attraction, trust, and love), but also in basic human emotions (i.e., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise). However, non-human primates and human studies can uncover the possible brain pathways of emotional attention and microsaccades, thus providing future research directions. In particular, the facilitated (or reduced) attention is common evidence that microsaccadic activities change under a variety of social modalities (e.g., cognition, music, mental illness, and working memory) that elicit emotions and feelings. Keywords: Emotional attention, Small eye movements, Microsaccadic direction, Brain mechanism, Mental illness
Background Fundamental functions of microsaccades
Staring at a target causes small eye movements such as microsaccades, drifts, and tremors. Microsaccades are the fastest and largest of the small eye movements and travel in a straight trajectory. Drifts are slow curvy motions that occur between microsaccades. Tremors are highly fast and small oscillations superimposed on drifts [1]. Microsaccadic activity during fixation on a stationary target plays an important role in preventing loss of vision by shifting the retinal image [1]. Microsaccadic responses are also correlated with advanced brain activities Correspondence: [email protected] 1 College of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, 1-1-1 Noji-higashi, Kusatsu, Shiga 525-8577, Japan 2 Graduate School of Technology, Industrial and Social Sciences, Tokushima University, 2-1 Minamijyousanjima, Tokushima 770-8506, Japan
such as visual and/or auditory perception and cognition [2, 3]. The microsaccadic rate is improved by attention, visual cues that imply succeeding target appearance [4], and oddball tasks [5, 6]. Moreover, hearing meaningful
Data Loading...
