Directing Voluntary Temporal Attention Increases Fixational Stability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our visual input is constantly changing, but not all moments are equally relevant. Visual temporal attention, the prioritization of visual information at specific points in time, increases perceptual sensitivity at behaviorally relevant times. The dynamic processes underlying this increase are unclear. During fixation, humans make small eye movements called microsaccades, and inhibiting microsaccades improves perception of brief stimuli. Here, we investigated whether temporal attention changes the pattern of microsaccades in anticipation of brief stimuli. Human observers (female and male) judged stimuli presented within a short sequence. Observers were given either an informative precue to attend to one of the stimuli, which was likely to be probed, or an uninformative (neutral) precue. We found strong microsaccadic inhibition before the stimulus sequence, likely due to its predictable onset. Critically, this anticipatory inhibition was stronger when the first target in the sequence (T1) was precued (task-relevant) than when the precue was uninformative. Moreover, the timing of the last microsaccade before T1 and the first microsaccade after T1 shifted such that both occurred earlier when T1 was precued than when the precue was uninformative. Finally, the timing of the nearest pre- and post-T1 microsaccades affected task performance. Directing voluntary temporal attention therefore affects microsaccades, helping to stabilize fixation at the most relevant moments over and above the effect of predictability. Just as saccading to a relevant stimulus can be an overt correlate of the allocation of spatial attention, precisely timed gaze stabilization can be an overt correlate of the allocation of temporal attention. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT We pay attention at moments in time when a relevant event is likely to occur. Such temporal attention improves our visual perception, but how it does so is not well understood. Here, we discovered a new behavioral correlate of voluntary, or goal-directed, temporal attention. We found that the pattern of small fixational eye movements called microsaccades changes around behaviorally relevant moments in a way that stabilizes the position of the eyes. Microsaccades during a brief visual stimulus can impair perception of that stimulus. Therefore, such fixation stabilization may contribute to the improvement of visual perception at attended times. This link suggests that, in addition to cortical areas, subcortical areas mediating eye movements may be recruited with temporal attention.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".