Stabilized vision through a bleaching window.

The visibility of stimuli flickering at low temporal frequencies was studied with images viewed normally and when stabilized by a new technique (bleached-window stabilization) that produces perfectly stabilized images without attachment to the eye. Contrary to expectation, sensitivity to low-frequency flicker was higher in the stabilized than in the unstabilized case. Several controls exclude the possibility that the paradoxical increase in sensitivity is an artefact of the new technique, and suggest that, in normal viewing, transient activity created by fixational eye-movements can mask the signals arising from the low-frequency flicker.