Abstract
Saccadic eye movements are simple, visually guided actions. Operant conditioning of specific saccade directions can reduce the latency of eye movements in the conditioned direction. However, it is not clear to what extent this learning transfers from the conditioned task to novel tasks. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the effects of operant conditioning of prosaccades to specific spatial locations would transfer to more complex oculomotor behaviours, specifically, prosaccades made in the presence of a distractor (Experiment 1) and antisaccades (Experiment 2). In part 1 of each experiment, participants were rewarded for making a saccade to one hemifield. In both experiments, the reward produced a significant facilitation of saccadic latency for prosaccades directed to the rewarded hemifield. In part 2, rewards were withdrawn, and the participant made a prosaccade to targets that were accompanied by a contralateral distractor (Experiment 1) or an antisaccade (Experiment 2). There were no hemifield-specific effects of the reward on saccade latency on the remote distractor effect or antisaccades, although the reward was associated with an overall slowing of saccade latency in Experiment 1. These data indicate that operant conditioning of saccadic eye movements does not transfer to similar but untrained tasks. We conclude that rewarding specific spatial locations is unlikely to induce long-term, systemic changes to the human oculomotor system.
Highlights
An eye movement is a paradigmatic example of a visually controlled action, as the kinematics of a saccade are fundamentally driven by the visual properties of the stimulus to which the saccade is directed, such as its luminance, spatial frequency and contrast [1], and its spatial and temporal proximity to other stimuli [2,3]
Phase, (F(2,22) = 4.36, p = < 0.03, η2 = 0.284) such that saccades made during the conditioning phase (M = 191 ms, SD = 23.31) where rewards were present were significantly faster than saccades made during the extinction phase (M = 220 ms, SD = 27.80; t(11) = −2.93, p = < 0.017, g = 0.956)
No significant differences were found between the latency of saccades made during the preconditioning phase (M = 217 ms, SD = 35.28) compared to those made during the conditioning (M = 191 ms, SD = 23.31; t(11) = 1.84, p = 0.094, g = 0.870) or extinction phases (M = 220 ms, SD = 27.80; t(11) = −0.44, p = 0.667, g = 0.095)
Summary
An eye movement is a paradigmatic example of a visually controlled action, as the kinematics of a saccade are fundamentally driven by the visual properties of the stimulus to which the saccade is directed, such as its luminance, spatial frequency and contrast [1], and its spatial and temporal proximity to other stimuli [2,3]. Eye movements are fundamentally spatial in nature, the majority of the studies in human participants have examined the effect of rewarding non-spatial visual features such as shape or colour on the visual control of oculomotor actions [13,14,15,16]. These studies typically yield a negative correlation between saccadic latency and reward, such that saccade latencies are faster to Vision 2019, 3, 20; doi:10.3390/vision3020020 www.mdpi.com/journal/vision
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