Tiny eye movements can be used as an index of humans’ ability to anticipate relevant information in the environment independent of the information’s sensory modality, a team of scientists at New York University has found. The work reveals a connection between eye movements and the sense of touch.
“The fact that tiny eye movements can hinder our ability to discriminate tactile stimuli, and that the suppression of those eye movements before an anticipated tactile stimulus can enhance that same ability, may reflect that common brain areas, as well as common neural and cognitive resources, underlie both eye movements and the processing of tactile stimuli,” explains Marisa Carrasco, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the latest issue of the journal Nature Communications.