We show that eye dominance strength influences saccade target selection. We discuss several arguments supporting the view that such advantage may be linked to the relationship between the dominant eye and ipsilateral hemisphere. French Abstract.

From birth, infants move their eyes to explore their environment, interact with it, and progressively develop a multitude of motor and cognitive abilities. The characteristics and development of oculomotor control in early childhood remain poorly understood today. Here, we examined reaction time and amplitude of saccadic eye movements in 93 7- to 42-month-old children while they oriented toward visual animated cartoon characters appearing at unpredictable locations on a computer screen over 140 trials. Results revealed that saccade performance is immature in children compared to a group of adults: Saccade reaction times were longer, and saccade amplitude relative to target location (10° eccentricity) was shorter. Results also indicated that performance is flexible in children. Although saccade reaction time decreased as age increased, suggesting developmental improvements in saccade control, saccade amplitude gradually improved over trials. Moreover, similar to adults, children were able to modify saccade amplitude based on the visual error made in the previous trial. This second set of results suggests that short visual experience and/or rapid sensorimotor learning are functional in children and can also affect saccade performance.

It is well known that the saccadic system presents multiple asymmetries. Notably, temporal (as opposed to nasal) saccades, centripetal (as opposed to centrifugal) saccades (i.e., the recentering bias) and saccades from the abducting eye (as opposed to the concomitant saccades from the adducting eye) exhibit higher peak velocities. However, these naso-temporal and centripetal-centrifugal asymmetries have always been studied separately. It is thus unknown which asymmetry prevails when there is a conflict between both asymmetries, i.e., in case of centripetal nasal saccades or centrifugal temporal saccades. This study involved binocular recordings of eye movements to examine both the naso-temporal and centripetal-centrifugal asymmetries so as to determine how they work together. Twenty-eight participants had to make saccades toward stimuli presented either centrally or in the periphery in binocular conditions. We found that temporal and abducting saccades always exhibit higher peak velocities than nasal and adducting saccades, irrespective of their centripetal or centrifugal nature. However, we showed that the velocity advantage for centripetal saccades is only found for temporal and not for nasal saccades. Such a result is of importance as it could provide new insights about the physiological origins of the asymmetries found in the saccadic system.