The antisaccade task: Sensory- and motor-related costs to oculomotor planning

Abstract

Poster presented at Vision Sciences Society St. Pete Beach, FL, USA, 16 – 22 May, 2014 The concurrent presentation of a target and a remote (i.e., contralateral, foveal) distractor increases the planning times of stimulus-driven prosaccades (i.e., the remote distractor effect, RDE). Conversely, distractors presented within proximal (i.e., ipsilateral) relations with the target are refractory to planning costs and affect the accurate nature of saccade amplitudes (i.e., the global effect: Findlay, 1982). In the present investigation, we sought to determine whether antisaccade planning is similarly influenced by the presentation of a remote and proximal distractor. Indeed, the basis for this question stems from the fact that the non-standard mapping between stimulus and response in the antisaccade task provides a basis for determining whether the sensoryor motor-related features of a distractor influence oculomotor planning times. In Experiment 1, participants completed proand antisaccades in a condition that entailed a single and exogenously presented target (i.e., control condition) and conditions wherein the target was presented simultaneously with distractors at remote (i.e., contralateral, foveal) or ipsilateral locations relative to the target. Results for prosaccade latencies showed the aforementioned RDE, whereas antisaccade latencies for all distractor locations were increased compared to their control condition counterparts. Experiment 2 involved same basic methods as Experiment 1 with the exception that we precued distractor location to reduce the attentional demands associated with disentangling target and distractor locations at response cueing. Results confirmed the findings of Experiment 1 in that antisaccade latencies were increased across each distractor location. Moreover, the antisaccade latency cost was increased when the spatial properties of the distractor were congruent with motor-related task goals. Based on these findings, we propose that the nonstandard nature of antisaccades renders a general increase in oculomotor planning times regardless of the distractor’s spatial properties. Further, we propose the spatial relations between distractor and motor-related goals elicit an increased inhibition of oculomotor networks than the spatial relations between distractor and veridical stimulus location.