Cristina Rovira has received Best short paper award of the ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA), held last week in Glasgow (Scotland, UK). The title of the work is "Characteristics of saccades and microsaccades during the fusional vergence test" which is part of his doctoral thesis. The other authors of the work are Clara Mestre, Marc Argilés and Jaume Pujol, researchers of CD6.

The work is published in the journal ACM and can be found at the following link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649902.3653343

This study investigated saccadic behaviour during the fusional vergence test as a function of disparity vergence demand. Participants’ divergence and convergence fusional vergence ranges were measured in an haploscopic setup. Disparity of a column of letters increased to 45 prism dioptres (PD) at 1 PD/s for both divergence and convergence. Eye movements were recorded using an Eyelink 1000 Plus, and a velocity-threshold-based algorithm was used to detect saccades. Saccades followed the main sequence, and their characteristics varied significantly with the direction of the underlying vergence movement. Saccades’ amplitude while fusion was maintained was smaller than during diplopia. Participants experienced diplopia for a longer time during divergence evaluation, which resulted in a higher prevalence of horizontal saccades than during convergence. This study highlights the impact of binocular conditions on saccade characteristics during fusional vergence tests, thus contributing to the understanding of how the visual system adapts to different vergence demands.