Motor skills improve with age from childhood into adulthood, and this improvement is reflected in the performance of smooth pursuit eye movements. In contrast, the saccadic system becomes mature earlier than the smooth pursuit system. Therefore, the present study investigates whether the early mature saccadic system compensates for the lower pursuit performance during childhood. To answer this ...

BACKGROUND When healthy subjects track a moving target, "catch-up" saccades are triggered to compensate for the non-perfect tracking gain. The evaluation of the pursuit and/or saccade kinematics requires that saccade and pursuit components be separated from the eye movement trace. A similar situation occurs when analyzes eye movements of patients that could contain eye drifts between saccades. ...

Several studies have shown that the precision of smooth pursuit eye speed can match perceptual speed discrimination thresholds during the steady-state phase of pursuit [Kowler, E., & McKee, S. (1987). Sensitivity of smooth eye movement to small differences in target velocity. Vision Research, 27, 993-1015; Gegenfurtner, K., Xing, D., Scott, B., & Hawken, M. (2003). A comparison of pursuit eye m...

Is the presence of foveal stimulation a necessary prerequisite for rhesus monkeys to perform visually guided eye movements? To answer this question, we trained two rhesus monkeys to direct their eyes towards imaginary targets defined by extrafoveal cues. Independent of the type of target, real or imaginary, the trajectory of target movement determined the type of eye movement produced: steps in...

The coordination of saccadic and smooth pursuit eye movements in macaque monkeys was investigated using a target selection paradigm with two moving targets crossing at a center fixation point. A task in which monkeys selected a target based on its color was used to test the hypothesis that common neural signals underlie target selection for pursuit and saccades, as well as testing whether targe...

Although much is known about volitional and reflexive smooth eye movements individually, much less is known about how they are coordinated. It is hypothesized that separate cortico-ponto-cerebellar loops subserve these different types of smooth eye movements. Specifically, the MT-MST-DLPN pathway is thought to be critical for ocular following eye movements, whereas the FEF-NRTP pathway is under...

23 Motor skills improve with age from childhood into adulthood and this improvement is reflected 24 in the performance of smooth pursuit eye movements. In contrast, the saccadic system 25 becomes mature earlier than the smooth pursuit system. Therefore, the present study 26 investigates whether the early mature saccadic system compensates for the lower pursuit 27 performance during childhood. T...