Dataset Information

No Evidence for a Saccadic Range Effect for Visually Guided and Memory-Guided Saccades in Simple Saccade-Targeting Tasks.

ABSTRACT: Saccades to single targets in peripheral vision are typically characterized by an undershoot bias. Putting this bias to a test, Kapoula [1] used a paradigm in which observers were presented with two different sets of target eccentricities that partially overlapped each other. Her data were suggestive of a saccadic range effect (SRE): There was a tendency for saccades to overshoot close targets and undershoot far targets in a block, suggesting that there was a response bias towards the center of eccentricities in a given block. Our Experiment 1 was a close replication of the original study by Kapoula [1]. In addition, we tested whether the SRE is sensitive to top-down requirements associated with the task, and we also varied the target presentation duration. In Experiments 1 and 2, we expected to replicate the SRE for a visual discrimination task. The simple visual saccade-targeting task in Experiment 3, entailing minimal top-down influence, was expected to elicit a weaker SRE. Voluntary saccades to remembered target locations in Experiment 3 were expected to elicit the strongest SRE. Contrary to these predictions, we did not observe a SRE in any of the tasks. Our findings complement the results reported by Gillen et al. [2] who failed to find the effect in a saccade-targeting task with a very brief target presentation. Together, these results suggest that unlike arm movements, saccadic eye movements are not biased towards making saccades of a constant, optimal amplitude for the task.

SUBMITTER: Nuthmann A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5033472 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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No Evidence for a Saccadic Range Effect for Visually Guided and Memory-Guided Saccades in Simple Saccade-Targeting Tasks.

Nuthmann Antje A Vitu Françoise F Engbert Ralf R Kliegl Reinhold R

PloS one 20160922 9

Saccades to single targets in peripheral vision are typically characterized by an undershoot bias. Putting this bias to a test, Kapoula [1] used a paradigm in which observers were presented with two different sets of target eccentricities that partially overlapped each other. Her data were suggestive of a saccadic range effect (SRE): There was a tendency for saccades to overshoot close targets and undershoot far targets in a block, suggesting that there was a response bias towards the center of ...[more]

PMID: 27658191

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Project description:Trans-saccadic memory consists of keeping track of objects' locations and features across saccades; pre-saccadic information is remembered and compared with post-saccadic information. It has been shown to have limited resources and involve attention with respect to the selection of objects and features. In support, a previous study showed that recognition of distinct post-saccadic objects in the visual scene is impaired when pre-saccadic objects are relevant and thus already encoded in memory (Poth, Herwig, Schneider, 2015). Here, we investigated the inverse (i.e. how the memory of pre-saccadic objects is affected by abrupt but irrelevant changes in the post-saccadic visual scene). We also modulated the amount of attention to the relevant pre-saccadic object by having participants either make a saccade to it or elsewhere and observed that pre-saccadic attentional facilitation affected how much post-saccadic changes disrupted trans-saccadic memory of pre-saccadic objects. Participants identified a flashed symbol (d, b, p, or q, among distracters), at one of six placeholders (figures "8") arranged in circle around fixation while planning a saccade to one of them. They reported the identity of the symbol after the saccade. We changed the post-saccadic scene in Experiment one by removing the entire scene, only the placeholder where the pre-saccadic symbol was presented, or all other placeholders except this one. We observed reduced identification performance when only the saccade-target placeholder disappeared after the saccade. In Experiment two, we changed one placeholder location (inward/outward shift or rotation re. saccade vector) after the saccade and observed that identification performance decreased with increased shift/rotation of the saccade-target placeholder. We conclude that pre-saccadic memory is disrupted by abrupt attention-capturing post-saccadic changes of visual scene, particularly when these changes involve the object prioritized by being the goal of a saccade. These findings support the notion that limited trans-saccadic memory resources are disrupted when object correspondence at saccadic goal is broken through removal or location change.

Dataset Information

No Evidence for a Saccadic Range Effect for Visually Guided and Memory-Guided Saccades in Simple Saccade-Targeting Tasks.

Publications

No Evidence for a Saccadic Range Effect for Visually Guided and Memory-Guided Saccades in Simple Saccade-Targeting Tasks.

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