Visuomotor Control Laboratory @ NASA Ames

Saccade detection in an eye-movement trace provides a starting point for analyses ranging from the inves- tigation of low-level oculomotor mechanisms to high-level cognitive processes. When the eye tracks the motion of the object of current interest (smooth pursuit), of the visual background (OKN), or of the resultant visual motion from a head movement (tVOR, rVOR), the smooth tracking movement is generally intermixed with rapid-phase saccadic eye movements, which must be excised to analyze the smooth components of tracking behavior properly. We describe a simple method to detect saccades on a background trace of var- iable velocity, compare our saccade-detection algorithm with the performance of an expert human obser- ver, and present an ideal-observer analysis to benchmark its detection performance.