Effect of eye movements on the contrast sensitivity of spatio-temporal patterns.

Abstract The contrast sensitivity (the reciprocal of the contrast threshold) was measured under various conditions of fixation such as normal involuntary eye movements, tension tremor, post-rotational nystagmus, and the coarse stabilization of the rehnal image. Most of the exaggerated eye movements reduced the contrast sensitivity for patterns of either low spatial or low temporal frequencies, and increased the sensitivity at high spatial and high temporal frequencies. Possible roles of the eye motion in detection of the spatio-temporal patterns are discussed.