It is commonly believed that the primary purpose of eye movements is to increase the information flow through the center of gaze. In this paper we directly test the influence of eye movement on the information flow to the brain by recording eye positions during free-viewing videos of natural activities and quantitatively analyzing the resulting visual input. The recorded eye positions are used to derive the gaze-centered time-varying images from the original video. The statistical properties of the resulting images, in particular, the temporal correlations are analyzed systematically and are used to verify quantitatively that the information flow at the center of gaze is dramatically increased due to saccadic eye movements, on a time scale longer than saccade interval.
Send comments to Dawei Dong: dawei@hope.caltech.edu