Abstract
The purpose of blinks is to keep the eyes hydrated and to protect them. Blinks are rarely noticed by the subject as blink-induced alterations of visual input are blanked out without jeopardizing the perception of visual continuity, features blinks share with saccades. Although not perceived, the blink-induced disconnection from the visual environment leads to a loss of information. Therefore there is critical need to minimize it. Here we demonstrate evidence for a new type of eye movement serving a distinct oculomotor demand, namely the resetting of eye torsion, likewise inevitably causing a loss of visual information. By integrating this eye movement into blinks, the inevitable down times of vision associated with each of the two behaviors are synchronized and the overall downtime minimized.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
No external funding was received for this work.
Ethics
Human subjects: All subjects gave written informed consent and consent to publication according to the declaration of Helsinki prior to the experiment. The study was approved by the ethics committee of the University of Tuebingen.
Reviewing Editor
- Jennifer L Raymond, Stanford University, United States
Publication history
- Received: March 22, 2016
- Accepted: August 5, 2016
- Accepted Manuscript published: August 23, 2016 (version 1)
- Accepted Manuscript updated: August 25, 2016 (version 2)
- Version of Record published: September 6, 2016 (version 3)
Copyright
© 2016, Khazali et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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