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Behavioral Evaluation of Movement Cancellation

¹Departments of Otolaryngology, ²Neuroscience, ³Bioengineering, and ⁴Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, University of Pittsburgh, Eye and Ear Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Submitted 15 December 2005; accepted in final form 23 May 2006

The countermanding saccade task has been used in many studies to investigate the neural mechanisms that underlie the decision to execute or restrain rapid eye movements. In this task, the presentation of a saccade target is sometimes followed by the appearance of a stop cue that indicates that the subject should cancel the planned movement. Performance has been modeled as a race between motor preparation and cancellation processes. The signal that reaches its activation threshold first determines whether a saccade is generated or cancelled. In these studies, an important parameter is the time required to process the stop cue, referred to as the stop signal reaction time (SSRT). The SSRT is estimated using statistical approaches, the validity of which has not been unequivocally established. A more direct measure of this parameter might be obtainable if a method was available to "unmask" the developing motor command. This can be accomplished by air-puff-evoked blinks, which inhibit pontine omnipause neurons that serve as an inhibitory gate for the saccadic system. In the present study, brief puffs of air were used to elicit blinks at various times while rhesus monkeys performed a countermanding saccade task. If the developing motor command has not yet been cancelled, this should trigger a saccade. When blinks occurred between 50 and 200 ms after target onset, saccades were often evoked. Saccades were rarely evoked more than 70 ms after stop cue onset; this value represents a behavioral evaluation of SSRT and was comparable to the estimates obtained using standard statistical approaches. When saccades occurred near the SSRT on blink trials, they were often hypometric. Furthermore, Monte Carlo simulations were performed to model the effects of blink time on the race model. Overall, the study supports the validity of the statistical methods currently in use.