# Stimulus-dependent delay of perceptual filling-in by microsaccades

## TL;DR

The study explores how small eye movements called microsaccades prevent visual illusions by stabilizing perception, depending on visual features like color contrast and gaze position.

## Contribution

The study reveals how microsaccade efficacy in preventing perceptual filling-in depends on retinal eccentricity but not color contrast.

## Key findings

- Increased color contrast delays perceptual filling-in but does not change microsaccade impact.
- Lower retinal eccentricity delays filling-in by increasing microsaccade efficacy.
- Microsaccades stabilize boundary perception via a retinal motion signal that scales with eccentricity.

## Abstract

Perception is a function of both stimulus features and active sensory sampling. The illusion of perceptual filling-in occurs when eye gaze is kept still: visual boundary perception may fail, causing adjacent visual features to remarkably merge into one uniform visual surface. Microsaccades—small, involuntary eye movements during gaze fixation—counteract perceptual filling-in, but the mechanisms underlying this process are not well-understood. We investigated whether microsaccade efficacy for preventing filling-in depends on two boundary properties, namely, color contrast and retinal eccentricity (distance from gaze center). Twenty-one human participants (male and female) fixated on a point until they experienced filling-in between two isoluminant colored surfaces. We found that increased color contrast independently extends the duration before filling-in, but does not alter the impact of individual microsaccades. Conversely, lower eccentricity delayed filling-in only by increasing microsaccade efficacy. We propose that microsaccades facilitate stable boundary perception via a transient retinal motion signal that scales with eccentricity but is invariant to boundary contrast. These results shed light on how incessant eye movements integrate with ongoing stimulus processing to stabilize perceptual detail, with implications for visual rehabilitation and the optimization of visual presentations in virtual and augmented reality environments.