Neurons in the macaque supplementary eye field (SEF) fire at different rates in conjunction with planning saccades in different directions. They also exhibit object-centered spatial selectivity, firing at different rates when the target of the saccade is at the left or right end of a horizontal bar. To compare the rate of incidence of the two kinds of signal, and to determine how they combine, ...

With every saccade, humans must reconcile the low resolution peripheral information available before a saccade, with the high resolution foveal information acquired after the saccade. While research has shown that we are able to integrate peripheral and foveal vision in a near-optimal manner, it is still unclear which mechanisms may underpin this important perceptual process. One potential mech...

The spatial values of retinal coordinates are "recalibrated" to the "egocentric" coordinates during and after a saccade within a fraction of a second. We measured the time constant of this retinal coordinate transformation by means of an afterimage technique: our ten subjects performed "auditory" horizontal saccades in total darkness (0.2-4.5 saccades/sec). At a saccade frequency below 1 saccad...

Many studies have found a strong coupling between selective attention and eye movements. The premotor theory of attention suggests that saccade preparation is directly responsible for such attentional shifts. While it has already been shown that the attentional shift is not directly coupled to the final stages of motor execution, it is currently unknown to what aspect of the earlier stages of s...

Saccadic eye movements bring objects of interest onto the high-resolution fovea. They also change the retinal location of objects, but our impression of the visual world is stable: We represent our visual world in spatiotopic coordinates. Visual stability could be the result of a null hypothesis that things do not move during a saccade, or of realigning retinal images based on an internal copy ...

Effects of saccades on individual neurons in the cat lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) were examined under two conditions: during spontaneous saccades in the dark and during stimulation by large, uniform flashes delivered at various times during and after rewarded saccades made to small visual targets. In the dark condition, a suppression of activity began 200-300 ms before saccade start, peaked...

When saccades consistently overshoot their targets, saccade amplitudes gradually decrease, thereby maintaining accuracy. This adaptive process has been seen as a form of motor learning that copes with changes in physical parameters of the eye and its muscles, brought about by aging or pathology. One would not expect such a motor-repair mechanism to be specific to the visual properties of the ta...

The introduction of a temporal gap between the disappearance of an initially fixated target and the appearance of an eccentric saccadic target results in a general reduction of saccadic reaction times (SRTs)-the gap effect-and often in the production of express saccades, the latencies of which approach the conduction time of the shortest neural pathways from the retina to the eye muscles. We in...

Express saccadic eye movements are saccades of extremely short latency. In monkey, express saccades have been shown to occur much more frequently when the monkey has been trained to make saccades in a particular direction to targets that appear in predictable locations. Such results suggest that express saccades occur in large number only under highly specific conditions, leading to the view th...

Saccadic adaptation maintains saccade accuracy and has been studied with targeting saccades, i.e. saccades that bring the gaze to a target, with the classical intra-saccadic step procedure in which the target systematically jumps to a new position during saccade execution. Post-saccadic visual feedback about the error between target position and the saccade landing position is crucial to establ...