Saccades modulate the relationship between visual motion and smooth eye movement. Before a saccade, pursuit eye movements reflect a vector average of motion across the visual field. After a saccade, pursuit primarily reflects the motion of the target closest to the endpoint of the saccade. We tested the hypothesis that the saccade produces a spatial weighting of motion around the endpoint of the saccade. Using a moving pursuit stimulus that stepped to a new spatial location just before a targeting saccade, we controlled the distance between the endpoint of the saccade and the position of the moving target. We demonstrate that the smooth eye velocity following the targeting saccade weights the presaccadic visual motion inputs by the distance from their location in space to the endpoint of the saccade, defining the extent of a spatiotemporal filter for driving the eyes. The center of the filter is located at the endpoint of the saccade in space, not at the position of the fovea. The filter is stable in the face of a distracter target, is present for saccades to stationary and moving targets, and affects both the speed and direction of the postsaccadic eye movement. The spatial filter can explain the target-selecting gain change in postsaccadic pursuit, and has intriguing parallels to the process by which perceptual decisions about a restricted region of space are enhanced by attention. The effect of the spatial saccade plan on the pursuit response to a given retinal motion describes the dynamics of a coordinate transformation.


    Access

    Download


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Saccades Exert Spatial Control of Motion Processing for Smooth Pursuit Eye Movements


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    2006-07-19



    Type of media :

    Research Data


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English


    Classification :

    DDC:    629




    Motion integration is anisotropic during smooth pursuit eye movements

    Souto, David / Chudasama, Jayesha / Kerzel, Dirk et al. | BASE | 2019

    Free access



    Ocular movements under taskload manipulations: Influence of geometry on saccades in air traffic control simulated tasks

    Marchitto, Mauro / Stasi, Leandro Luigi di / Canas, Jose Juan | Tema Archive | 2012


    Noisy optimal control strategies for modelling saccades

    Jones, Garrett L. | BASE | 2011

    Free access