Zoom Brown Bag: A New Model of Binocular Eye Movement Control

Abstract:  Despite that we have two eyes, dominant models of voluntary eye movement control except a single input, and issue a single conjugate command, in accordance with Hering’s Law. When midline gaze shifts are required, Hering postulated that another single command generates vergence. Many natural gaze shifts are not simply restricted to the frontoparallel plane, or the midline. Hering resolved this by postulating that conjugate and vergence commands simply sum. These “classic” theories have guided basic oculomotor research and strabismus intervention for over a century, but have recently been challenged with new data from an occluded eye (Chandna et al., 2021). https://www.ski.org/users/steve-heinen

I will present a new model of binocular control that can explain occluded eye data, and can generate other human oculomotor behavior that challenges existing models. The model consists of a fast, binocular conjugate component that is modulated by slow, independent controllers on each eye. The independent controllers can use interpreted sensory information to generate eye movements even when sensory evidence is incomplete.

Improving Zoom accessibility for people with hearing impairments  

People with hearing impairments often use lipreading and speechreading to improve speech comprehension. This approach is helpful but only works if the speaker’s face and mouth are clearly visible. For the benefit of people with hearing impairments on Zoom calls, please enable your device’s camera whenever you are speaking on Zoom, and face the camera while you speak. (Feel free to disable your camera when you aren’t speaking.)