C.C.A.M. (Stan) Gielen

Coordination of fast eye and arm movements in a tracking task.

SummaryEye and arm movements to single and double-step target displacements were studied to investigate whether or not the motor systems of the eye and arm share common command signals from the internal representation, which specify a) when a movement is initiated and b) the end position of a movement. The correlation between the time of onset of eye and arm movements was significant for single-step and double-step target displacements into the same direction. However, it was small and not significant for double-step target displacements into opposite directions if the time interval between first and second target displacement was 75 or 100 ms. This indicates that the command signal which specifies when a movement is started is different for both systems. However, the reconstructed signal in the internal representation, which specifies the end position of movements, is rather similar for eye and arm movements which seems to point to a common command signal. This result was corroborated by experiments in which eye and arm were found to jump always to the same target in the condition that two different targets were presented simultaneously.

Perception of three-dimensional shape from ego- and object-motion: comparison between small- and large-field stimuli.

We compare the performance in the detection of the shape of concave, planar and convex surfaces for small-field (8 deg) and large-field (90 deg) stimuli. Shape is perceived from head translations, object translations and object rotations. We find large differences between small-field and large-field stimulation. For small-field stimulation performance is best for object rotation, intermediate for self-motion and worst for object translation. For large-field stimulation performance is similar across conditions. Few errors on the sign of the curvature are found for self-motion for both field sizes, indicating that self-motion information disambiguates the curvature sign. For object rotation with small-field stimulation, the concave-convex ambiguity is strong with many apparent deformations. In contrast, large-field curvature signs are always accurately reported, suggesting that the weight of the rigidity hypothesis depends on field size.

An alternative three-dimensional interpretation of Hering's equal-innervation law for version and vergence eye movements

In the context of Herings equal-innervation law, this paper discusses the problem of how the three-dimensional positions of the two eyes, each expressed by a rotation vector, can be separated into contributions of the version and vergence system. As proposed by Van Rijn and Van den Berg [(1993) Vision Research, 33, 691-708], this can be done by taking the sum and difference of the position rotation vectors of each eye. In our alternative procedure the vergence signal is defined as the rotation which transforms the left eye position into the right eye position and the version signal is the common factor in both eye positions that remains after removing the vergence signal. The version and vergence contributions, defined in this way, can be interpreted straightforwardly as rotations. When Van Rijn and Van den Berg applied their definitions to their own data, they obtained the interesting result that the reconstructed version and vergence contributions were effectively limited to two dimensions (2D). The version signal was confined to Listings plane (no torsion) whereas the vergence signal remained within a horizontal-torsional plane (no vertical vergence). They showed theoretically that a model based on 2D version/2D vergence control will indeed produce the torsional eye positions in near fixations found in their experiments. This model cannot account for a second set of data in the literature [Mok, Ro, Cadera, Crawford & Vilis (1992) Vision Research, 32, 2055-2064]. With our definitions, we found that the simple 2D version/2D vergence control strategy cannot account for the Van Rijn and Van den Berg (1993) data but is nicely compatible with the considerably smaller amount of cyclotorsion in the data collected by Mok et al. (1992). We also show that, in such a system, having 2D vergence control is compatible with minimization of torsional disparity and provides the cyclovergence signals suitable for stabilizing the eyes in the non-Listing positions caused by a vertical saccade in near vision.