Journal article

Saccade reaction time asymmetries during task-switching in pursuit tracking

  • Bieg, Hans-Joachim Department of Human Perception, Cognition and Action, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany
  • Bresciani, Jean-Pierre Department of Medicine, University of Fribourg, Switzerland - Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition, Université Pierre Mendes France, Grenoble, France
  • Bülthoff, Heinrich H. Department of Human Perception, Cognition and Action, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany - Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Korea
  • Chuang, Lewis L. Department of Human Perception, Cognition and Action, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany
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    01.10.2013
Published in:
  • Experimental Brain Research. - 2013, vol. 230, no. 3, p. 271–281
English We investigate how smooth pursuit eye movements affect the latencies of task-switching saccades. Participants had to alternate their foveal vision between a continuous pursuit task in the display center and a discrete object discrimination task in the periphery. The pursuit task was either carried out by following the target with the eyes only (ocular) or by steering an on-screen cursor with a joystick (oculomanual). We measured participants’ saccadic reaction times (SRTs) when foveal vision was shifted from the pursuit task to the discrimination task and back to the pursuit task. Our results show asymmetries in SRTs depending on the movement direction of the pursuit target: SRTs were generally shorter in the direction of pursuit. Specifically, SRTs from the pursuit target were shorter when the discrimination object appeared in the motion direction. SRTs to pursuit were shorter when the pursuit target moved away from the current fixation location. This result was independent of the type of smooth pursuit behavior that was performed by participants (ocular/oculomanual). The effects are discussed in regard to asymmetries in attention and processes that suppress saccades at the onset of pursuit.
Faculty
Faculté des sciences et de médecine
Department
Département de Médecine
Language
  • English
Classification
Biological sciences
License
License undefined
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/303293
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