Microsaccades Are Coupled to Heartbeat

Abstract

In the present study, we show that microsaccades are coupled to heartbeat. Moreover, we revealed a strong modulation of slow eye movements around the R peak in the ECG. These results suggest that heartbeat as a basic physiological signal is related to statistical modulations of fixational eye movements, in particular, the generation of microsaccades. Therefore, our findings add a new perspective on the principles underlying the generation of fixational eye movements. Importantly, our study highlights the need to record eye movements when studying the influence of heartbeat in neuroscience to avoid misinterpretation of eye-movement-related artifacts as heart-evoked modulations of neural processing.