The role of the crystalline lens in saccadic suppression and displacements

This post-doc project will collaborate with experts in computer vision and gaze estimation to use high-speed cameras for detecting the relative movements of the crystalline lens in the eye. Aside from the technical developments, this lens movement information will be used to better model the phenomena of saccadic suppression and perceptual distortions. Saccadic suppression is the phenomenon where the visual intake is suppressed from further processing during an eye movement. Tracking the movements of the lens may provide a better model for the bottom-up components of this effect than tracking the entire eye, as the lens moves relative to the eye and especially so during accelerations and decelerations of the eye. Perceptual distortion is the phenomenon where the relative movement of the lens in the eye displaces visual information on the retina, reducing performance when e.g. determining the position of a flashing target. The results from this project are also important for almost all eye-tracking research. Relative movements of the lens cause periods in all data after saccades which the current parsing algorithms are unable to handle. Rather, these periods randomly gets assigned to either a fixation period or a saccade period, and there is no clear information on where they should belong. Additionally, these results may be important for the many cataract patients that receive prosthetic lenses with different mass (and in turn different relative movements in the eye).