Journal
NATURE NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 4, Issue 10, Pages 1037-1042Publisher
NATURE AMERICA INC
DOI: 10.1038/nn723
Keywords
-
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
To make a saccadic eye movement to a target we must first attend to it. It is therefore not surprising that diverting attention increases saccade latency, but is latency increased in all cases? We show that attending to a peripheral discrimination task has a paradoxical effect. If the stimulus to be attended appears shortly (100 to 300 ms) before an eye movement is made in a direction opposite to that of a presented stimulus (an antisaccade), its latency is reduced to well below baseline performance. In contrast, latencies for saccades toward the stimulus (prosaccades) are increased under similar conditions. This paradoxical effect may arise from competition between the processes mediating prosaccades and antisaccades. When the discrimination task is presented at the critical moment, it interferes with a reflexive prosaccade, allowing faster antisaccades. The results suggest that the suppression of sensorimotor reflexes can facilitate volitional motor acts.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available