Limit cycle oscillations of the human eye

The altered feedback technique is very suited to display nonlinearities of the human smooth pursuit system. In fact, when the gain of the retinal feedback path is raised, for the horizontal channel, above its normal unitary negative value, a threshold is met beyond which sustained horizontal self-excited smooth oscillations of the eye can be observed, which point out the existence of a stable limit cycle. Furthermore, the characterizing features of both the transient and steady state show a well defined dependence on the total feedback factor K. In particular, the analytical dependence on K of the amplitude and frequency of limit cycle oscillations can be derived. Implications of the experiment with respect to the mathematical modelling of the system are discussed.