Saccadic latency effects of progressively deleting stimulus offsets and onsets

AbstractWe designed two extensions of Saslow's well-known gap and overlap conditions that require increased voluntary effort because of the progressive elimination of target onsets and fixation point offsets, and obtained repeatable data obeying simple numerical relations. For each of the five stimulus lighting conditions, saccadic latency was measured as a function of the retinal eccentricity or displacement of the target. Latencies were fitted by a serial processing model in which the visually guided minimum tracking latency VGLmin is supplemented by two types of delay, dubbed `unlock' and `target', that can be either short or long (`direct' or `indirect'), depending on the conditions. There are two findings: (1) The model has utility. The rank order of saccadic latencies for the five stimulus lighting conditions was constant across all subjects, sessions and eccentricities in the range 7.5′–6° left or right. For pooled data, and the saccadic latency plateau (1–6°), the model was also within ±3 ms of the mean latencies. (2) Latencies of tiny saccades to intrafoveolar stimulation (7.5–45′) were invariably long in all five stimulus conditions. One factor here must be the experimentally measured local prolongation of VGLmin

Track E Implementation Science, Health Systems and Economics

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138412/1/jia218443.pd

The joint contributions of saccades and ocular drift to repeated ocular fixations

AbstractWe measured the joint contributions of different sized saccades and ocular drift to overall performance in an alternating fixation task. Subjects repeatedly shifted fixation between the centres of a pair of bars of width 2°–2 arc min, either mentally selected or electronically cut from a stationary sine grating display. Eye movement patterns exhibited consistent features across all displays, and pairs of widely separated bars were studied most. Variability (S.D.) and relative accuracy (under/overshooting bias) were estimated from the concentration of eye positions over the two target bars. Overall variability, i.e. for eye movements as a whole, reached a minimum of 5 min for bar widths less than 20 min across subjects, displays and tasks. This was consistent, as were several other aspects of the study, with a constant 20-min diameter goal zone hypothesis. For wide bars, overall variability increased nearly as the square root of bar width, and for narrow bars, was independent of bar separation. A typical between-bar crossing saccade was tightly constrained in departure point but widely scattered in landing position, the associated variability increasing with bar separation. The final high overall precision was achieved largely by within-bar saccades of greater than 7.5 min effective amplitude that were present at a rate of 1 (range 0.3–3) per crossing saccade. This is consistent with views that very small saccades (the smaller microsaccades) make little obvious contribution to oculomotor performance

Prosodic knowledge affects the recognition of newly acquired words

Item does not contain fulltextAn eye-tracking study examined the involvement of prosodic knowledge-specifically, the knowledge that monosyllabic words tend to have longer durations than the first syllables of polysyllabic words-in the recognition of newly learned words. Participants learned new spoken words (by associating them to novel shapes): bisyllables and onset-embedded monosyllabic competitors (e.g., baptoe and bap). In the learning phase, the duration of the ambiguous sequence (e.g., bap) was held constant. In the test phase, its duration was longer than, shorter than, or equal to its learning-phase duration. Listeners' fixations indicated that short syllables tended to be interpreted as the first syllables of the bisyllables, whereas long syllables generated more monosyllabic-word interpretations. Recognition of newly acquired words is influenced by prior prosodic knowledge and is therefore not determined solely on the basis of stored episodes of those words.6 p

Antisaccades and remembered saccades in Parkinson's disease.

Antisaccades were studied in ten patients with mild to moderate Parkinson's disease and ten age-matched normal controls. Remembered saccades and reflex saccades were assessed for comparison. In the population of patients who showed the previously reported abnormalities of remembered saccades, antisaccades were indistinguishable from those of controls in latency, gain and peak velocity. This finding implies that antisaccades are mediated through pathways which are unaffected by Parkinson's disease, and which are therefore presumably distinct from pathways mediating other voluntary saccades