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Saccade Adaptation Specific to Visual Context

¹Department of Biology, The City College of New York; and ²PhD Program in Biology, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, New York, New York

Submitted 22 September 2008; accepted in final form 16 January 2009

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 target stimulus. We had subjects make saccades to sudden movements of either of two targets—a steadily illuminated circle or a flickering circle—one of which stepped back during each saccade it elicited, simulating the effect of a hypermetric saccade. Saccade gain (saccade amplitude/target amplitude) decreased by 15% for the target that stepped back versus 6% for the target that did not step back. Most of the change in gain between successive blocks of trials of each type occurred on the first saccade of the block, decreasing by 0.12 on the first trial of a step-back block and increasing by 0.1 on the first trial of a no-step-back block. The differential adaptation of the two targets required postsaccadic feedback of both target types, as shown in a separate experiment, in which saccades to only one target received feedback, and the gain did not differ between the two target types. This demonstration that a context defined by a visual stimulus can serve as an effective cue for switching saccade gain between states suggests that saccade adaptation may have a heretofore unsuspected dimension of adaptability.