Eye To Beat Visual Mechanism Research

When we look around the world, we perform frequent eye movements. In vision research field, research of eye movement is the most effective way to investgate visual cognition and visual information processing. In recent years, with the development of eye movement measuring instruments, the eye movement research received wide attention and application in the field of basic research science, clinical science and neuropsychology, etc. We use a psychophysical experiments combined saccadic eyemovement with Chinese characters recognition to explore the mechanism of human perception during saccadic eye movement, and how does it works during reading.On average our eyes make3-5saccadic movements per second when we read, although their purpose is still unclear. It is generally thought that saccades help redirect the retinal fovea to specific characters and words but that actual discrimination of information only occurs during periods of fixation. Indeed, it has been proposed that there is active suppression of information processing during saccades to avoid experience of blurring due to the high-speed movement. Here, using a paradigm where a string of either lexical (Chinese) or non-lexical (alphabetic) characters are triggered by saccadic eye movements, we show for the first time that contrary to this view subjects can discriminate both while making saccadic eye movements towards a fixation point. Moreover, discrimination accuracy is significantly better for characters scanned during the saccadic movement to a fixation point than those not scanned beyond it. Our results therefore suggest that saccades during reading not only function to redirect the fovea to fixate the next character or word but allow pre-processing of information from ones adjacent to the previous fixation to help target the next most salient one. In this way saccades can not only promote continuity in reading words but also actively facilitate reading comprehension.