Role of smooth pursuit eye-movements on the detection of moving objects in X-ray fluoroscopy noise

The authors investigate the role of smooth pursuit eye movements on the detection of low contrast moving cylinders in spatio-temporal Poisson noise. They performed an interspersed reference/test adaptive forced choice experiment to measure the detectability of a moving cylinder with a high contrast marker that allows smooth pursuit eye-tracking (test) and without the marker (reference). The authors have recorded a degradation in detectability of 49% for a velocity of 8.8 deg/sec as compared to a stationary cylinder for the case without the motion marker. The detectability decreased by 24% with the motion marker. This suggests that smooth pursuit of motion improves the detectability of moving objects.