A change in perspective: The interaction of saccadic and pursuit eye movements in oculomotor control and perception

Goettker, Alexander; Gegenfurtner, Karl R.

doi:10.1016/j.visres.2021.08.004

Cited by 30 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 204 publications

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“…Whereas PD patients exhibited bradykinesia when reaching for a stationary object, they moved as fast as controls and with comparable accuracy when reaching for a moving object (Majsak et al, 1998(Majsak et al, , 2008. These studies highlight the importance of considering movement requirements and time constraints in oculomotor and sensorimotor control (Goettker and Gegenfurtner, 2021). Whereas reaches to stationary objects required a fast but self-determined movement, dynamic objects rolled rapidly toward a contact zone, providing an external cue for urgent reaches.…”

Section: Differential Vulnerability To Stationary Versus Dynamic Visu...mentioning

confidence: 80%

Preservation of Eye Movements in Parkinson's Disease Is Stimulus- and Task-Specific

et al. 2021

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Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease that includes motor impairments, such as tremor, bradykinesia, and postural instability. Although eye movement deficits are commonly found in saccade and pursuit tasks, preservation of oculomotor function has also been reported. Here we investigate specific task and stimulus conditions under which oculomotor function in PD is preserved. Sixteen PD patients and 18 healthy, age-matched controls completed a battery of movement tasks that included stationary or moving targets eliciting reactive or deliberate eye movements: pro-saccades, anti-saccades, visually guided pursuit, and rapid go/no-go manual interception. Compared with controls, patients demonstrated systematic impairments in tasks with stationary targets: pro-saccades were hypometric and anti-saccades were incorrectly initiated toward the cued target in ;35% of trials compared with 14% errors in controls. In patients, task errors were linked to short latency saccades, indicating abnormalities in inhibitory control. However, patients' eye movements in response to dynamic targets were relatively preserved. PD patients were able to track and predict a disappearing moving target and make quick go/no-go decisions as accurately as controls. Patients' interceptive hand movements were slower on average but initiated earlier, indicating adaptive processes to compensate for motor slowing. We conclude that PD patients demonstrate stimulus and task dependency of oculomotor impairments, and we propose that preservation of eye and hand movement function in PD is linked to a separate functional pathway through the superior colliculus-brainstem loop that bypasses the fronto-basal ganglia network. Our results demonstrate that studying oculomotor and hand movement function in PD can support disease diagnosis and further our understanding of disease progression and dynamics.

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Section: Differential Vulnerability To Stationary Versus Dynamic Visu...mentioning

confidence: 80%

Preservation of Eye Movements in Parkinson's Disease Is Stimulus- and Task-Specific

et al. 2021

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“…Although SPEM per definition cannot include saccades, research has started to acknowledge the synergy between the both ocular systems and some even argue for a single sensorimotor process (Goettker & Gegenfurtner, 2021 ; Orban de Xivry & Lefevre, 2007 ). Traditionally SPEM and saccades were thought to be exclusively mediated through a motion and position pathway, respectively, however, more recent research has shown that a collaborative response of SPEM and saccades during target tracking is based on shared motion and position information (Goettker, Braun, & Gegenfurtner, 2019a ; Goettker, Brenner, et al, 2019b ; Orban de Xivry et al, 2006 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of internally directed cognition on smooth pursuit eye movements: A systematic examination of perceptual decoupling

Korda

Annerer‐Walcher

Körner

et al. 2023

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Eye behavior differs between internally and externally directed cognition and thus is indicative of an internal versus external attention focus. Recent work implicated perceptual decoupling (i.e., eye behavior becoming less determined by the sensory environment) as one of the key mechanisms involved in these attention-related eye movement differences. However, it is not yet understood how perceptual decoupling depends on the characteristics of the internal task. Therefore, we systematically examined effects of varying internal task demands on smooth pursuit eye movements. Specifically, we evaluated effects of the internal workload (control vs. low vs. high) and of internal task (arithmetic vs. visuospatial). The results of multilevel modelling showed that effects of perceptual decoupling were stronger for higher workload, and more pronounced for the visuospatial modality. Effects also followed a characteristic time-course relative to internal operations. The findings provide further support of the perceptual decoupling mechanism by showing that it is sensitive to the degree of interference between external and internal information.

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“…It should be noted that while, in our view, the observed features of saccadic tracking might imply the use of an allocentric frame of reference during occluded tracking, we are not asserting anything about the reference frame used during visible object tracking, as smooth pursuit tracking does not rule out the use of allocentric information ( Fehd & Seiffert, 2010 ). Furthermore, we emphasize that we are not viewing smooth pursuit and saccade systems as two separate systems, as they are known to interact ( Krauzlis, 2004 ; Lappi, 2016 ; Goettker & Gegenfurtner, 2021 )—pursuits and saccades are simply the observed gaze features that are useful for characterizing gaze behavior in this task.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracking an occluded visual target with sequences of saccades

et al. 2022

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Gaze behavior during visual tracking consists of a combination of pursuit and saccadic movements. When the tracked object is intermittently occluded, the role of smooth pursuit is reduced, with a corresponding increase in the role of saccades. However, studies of visual tracking during occlusion have focused only on the first few saccades, usually with occlusion periods of less than 1 second in duration. We investigated tracking on a circular trajectory with random occlusions and found that an occluded object can be tracked reliably for up to several seconds with mainly anticipatory saccades and very little smooth pursuit. Furthermore, we investigated the accumulation of uncertainty in prediction and found that prediction errors seem to accumulate faster when an absolute reference frame is not available during tracking. We suggest that the observed saccadic tracking reflects the use of a time-based internal estimate of object position that is anchored to the environment via fixations.

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A change in perspective: The interaction of saccadic and pursuit eye movements in oculomotor control and perception

Cited by 30 publications

References 204 publications

Preservation of Eye Movements in Parkinson's Disease Is Stimulus- and Task-Specific

Preservation of Eye Movements in Parkinson's Disease Is Stimulus- and Task-Specific

Effects of internally directed cognition on smooth pursuit eye movements: A systematic examination of perceptual decoupling

Tracking an occluded visual target with sequences of saccades

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