Microsaccadic Suppression of Visual Bursts in the Primate Superior Colliculus

Saccadic suppression, a behavioral phenomenon in which perceptual thresholds are elevated before, during, and after saccadic eye movements, is an important mechanism for maintaining perceptual stability. However, even during fixation, the eyes never remain still, but undergo movements including microsaccades, drift, and tremor. The neural mechanisms for mediating perceptual stability in the face of these fixational movements are not fully understood. Here, we investigated one component of such mechanisms: a neural correlate of microsaccadic suppression. We measured the size of short-latency, stimulus-induced visual bursts in superior colliculus neurons of adult, male rhesus macaques. We found that microsaccades caused similar to 30% suppression of the bursts. Suppression started similar to 70 ms before microsaccade onset and ended similar to 70 ms after microsaccade end, a time course similar to behavioral measures of this phenomenon in humans. We also identified a new behavioral effect of microsaccadic suppression on saccadic reaction times, even for continuously presented, suprathreshold visual stimuli. These results provide evidence that the superior colliculus is part of the mechanism for suppressing self-generated visual signals during microsaccades that might otherwise disrupt perceptual stability.