Ocular following in humans: Spatial properties

Abstract

Ocular following responses (OFRs) are tracking eye movements elicited at ultrashort latency by the sudden movement of a textured pattern. Here we report the results of our study of their dependency on the spatial arrangement of the motion stimulus. Unlike previous studies that looked at the effect of stimulus size, we investigated the impact of stimulus location and how two distinct stimuli, presented together, collectively determine the OFR. We used as stimuli vertical gratings that moved in the horizontal direction and that were confined to either one or two 0.58° high strips, spanning the width of the screen. We found that the response to individual strips varied as a function of the location and spatial frequency (SF) of the stimulus. The response decreased as the stimulus eccentricity increased, but this relationship was more accentuated at high than at low spatial frequencies. We also found that when pairs of stimuli were presented, nearby stimuli interacted strongly, so that the response to the pair was barely larger than the response to a single strip in the pair. This suppressive effect faded away as the separation between the strips increased. The variation of the suppressive interaction with strip separation, paired with the dependency on eccentricity of the responses to single strips, caused the peak response for strip pairs to be achieved at a specific separation, which varied as a function of SF.