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Naso-Temporal Asymmetry for Signals Invisible to the Retinotectal Pathway

¹School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom; ²Division of Neuroscience, Imperial College London, United Kingdom; and ³Wolfson Centre for Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Wales, Bangor, United Kingdom

Submitted 27 February 2008; accepted in final form 7 May 2008

Monocular viewing conditions show an asymmetry between stimuli presented in the temporal and nasal visual fields in their efficiency for automatically triggering eye saccades and grasping attention. For instance, observers free to make a saccade to one of two stimuli presented together orient preferentially to the temporal stimulus. Such naso-temporal asymmetry (NTA) has been assumed to reflect the asymmetry in the retinotectal pathway to the superior colliculus. We tested this hypothesis using S cone stimuli, which are invisible to the magnocellular and retinotectal pathways. The observed NTA in choice saccades to bilateral stimuli was no less present for S cone stimuli than for luminance stimuli. Additionally, the amplitude of the NTA can be enhanced when S cone signals are added to luminance signals. These results suggest that behavioral NTA in humans is not diagnostic of retinotectal mediation. Furthermore, we found no asymmetries in latency, suggesting that the NTA in saccade choice does not originate simply from a bottom-up asymmetry in any low level visual pathways.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				A. Bompas and P. Sumner Oculomotor Distraction by Signals Invisible to the Retinotectal and Magnocellular Pathways J Neurophysiol, October 1, 2009; 102(4): 2387 - 2395. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]