J. Neurosci. ：揭秘微扫视触发的漩涡视觉错觉

一项新研究揭开了“旋转蛇”（Rotating Snakes）视觉错觉如何欺骗大脑的奥秘。

Credit: Akiyoshi Kitaoka

早前有研究表明，这种漩涡运动错觉是由眼睛慢慢飘离中央目标物所引发的。但凤凰城巴罗神经学研究所（ Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix）的视觉神经科学家通过跟踪8位志愿者的眼球运动，得出了一个完全不同的解释。

实验中，志愿者在看到漩涡时，打开按钮，漩涡消失，关闭按钮。研究人员发现，在志愿者看到漩涡前，眼球开始闪烁或者微扫视（microsaccades），当志愿者微扫视频率降低，幻觉则开始消失，漩涡也随即停止。Jorge Otero Millan将这一发现发表在4月25日的 Journal of Neuroscience上 。

这一发现可用于幻觉产生的研究，研究知觉与现实之间的失和有助于更深入的了解人的大脑活动。

doi: 10.1523/?JNEUROSCI.5823-11.2012
PMC:
PMID:

Microsaccades and Blinks Trigger Illusory Rotation in the “Rotating Snakes” Illusion

Jorge Otero-Millan, Stephen L. Macknik, and Susana Martinez-Conde

Certain repetitive arrangements of luminance gradients elicit the perception of strong illusory motion. Among them, the “Rotating Snakes Illusion” has generated a large amount of interest in the visual neurosciences, as well as in the public. Prior evidence indicates that the Rotating Snakes illusion depends critically on eye movements, yet the specific eye movement types involved and their associated neural mechanisms remain controversial. According to recent reports, slow ocular drift—a nonsaccadic type of fixational eye movement—drives the illusion, whereas microsaccades produced during attempted fixation fail to do so. Here, we asked human subjects to indicate the presence or absence of rotation during the observation of the illusion while we simultaneously recorded their eye movements with high precision. We found a strong quantitative link between microsaccade and blink production and illusory rotation. These results suggest that transient oculomotor events such as microsaccades, saccades, and blinks, rather than continuous drift, act to trigger the illusory motion in the Rotating Snakes illusion.