Donders Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Donders Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Neuroimage. 2019 Jul 15;195:444-453. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.03.069. Epub 2019 Apr 3.
Eye movements are an integral part of human perception, but can induce artifacts in many magneto-encephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) studies. For this reason, investigators try to minimize eye movements and remove these artifacts from their data using different techniques. When these artifacts are not purely random, but consistent regarding certain stimuli or conditions, the possibility arises that eye movements are actually inducing effects in the MEG signal. It remains unclear how much of an influence eye movements can have on observed effects in MEG, since most MEG studies lack a control analysis to verify whether an effect found in the MEG signal is induced by eye movements. Here, we find that we can decode stimulus location from eye movements in two different stages of a working memory match-to-sample task that encompass different areas of research typically done with MEG. This means that the observed MEG effect might be (partly) due to eye movements instead of any true neural correlate. We suggest how to check for eye movement effects in the data and make suggestions on how to minimize eye movement artifacts from occurring in the first place.
眼球运动是人类感知的一个组成部分，但会在许多脑磁图（MEG）和脑电图（EEG）研究中引起伪影。出于这个原因，研究人员试图通过使用不同的技术来最小化眼球运动并从数据中去除这些伪影。当这些伪影不是纯粹随机的，而是与某些刺激或条件一致时，就有可能出现眼球运动实际上在 MEG 信号中引起效应的情况。由于大多数 MEG 研究缺乏控制分析来验证在 MEG 信号中发现的效应是否是由眼球运动引起的，因此，眼球运动对 MEG 中观察到的效应有多大影响仍不清楚。在这里，我们发现我们可以从一个工作记忆匹配样本任务的两个不同阶段的眼球运动中解码刺激位置，该任务涵盖了通常使用 MEG 进行的不同研究领域。这意味着观察到的 MEG 效应可能（部分）是由于眼球运动而不是任何真正的神经相关物引起的。我们建议如何在数据中检查眼球运动效应，并就如何首先最小化眼球运动伪影的产生提出建议。
