Previous studies on sensorimotor adaptation revealed no awareness of the nature of the perturbation after adaptation to an abrupt 30° rotation of visual feedback or after adaptation to gradually introduced perturbations. Whether the degree of awareness depends on the magnitude of the perturbation, though, has as yet not been tested. Instead of using questionnaires, as was often done in previous work, the present study used a process dissociation procedure to measure awareness and unawareness. A naïve, implicit group and a group of subjects using explicit strategies adapted to 20°, 40° and 60° cursor rotations in different adaptation blocks that were each followed by determination of awareness and unawareness indices. The awareness index differed between groups and increased from 20° to 60° adaptation. In contrast, there was no group difference for the unawareness index, but it also depended on the size of the rotation. Early adaptation varied between groups and correlated with awareness: The more awareness a participant had developed the more the person adapted in the beginning of the adaptation block. In addition, there was a significant group difference for savings but it did not correlate with awareness. Our findings suggest that awareness depends on perturbation size and that aware and strategic processes are differentially involved during adaptation and savings. Moreover, the use of the process dissociation procedure opens the opportunity to determine awareness and unawareness indices in future sensorimotor adaptation research.

In this paper, we show that human saccadic eye movements toward a visual target are generated with a reduced latency when this target is spatially and temporally aligned with an irrelevant auditory nontarget. This effect gradually disappears if the temporal and/or spatial alignment of the visual and auditory stimuli are changed. When subjects are able to accurately localize the auditory stimulus in two dimensions, the spatial dependence of the reduction in latency depends on the actual radial distance between the auditory and the visual stimulus. If, however, only the azimuth of the sound source can be determined by the subjects, the horizontal target separation determines the strength of the interaction. Neither saccade accuracy nor saccade kinematics were affected in these paradigms. Wepropose that, in addition to an aspecific warning signal, the reduction of saccadic latency is due to interactions that take place at a multimodal stage of saccade programming, where the perceived positions of visual and auditory stimuli are represented in a common frame of reference. This hypothesis is in agreement with our finding that the saccades often are initially directed to the average position of the visual and the auditory target, provided that their spatial separation is not too large. Striking similarities with electrophysiological findings on multisensory interactions in the deep layers of the midbrain superior colliculus are discussed.Humans, as well as other animals, are equipped with various specialized senses that provide them with information about their environment. Several of these sensory systems represent the spatial location of an object on the basis ofthe received sensory input. This information about stimulus location can already be present at the level of the sensory organ, as is the case in the visual and somatosensory systems, or it can be neurally derived on the basis ofindirect cues, as in the auditory system. Many of the objects that surround an organism, however, provide it with sensory information through various modalities at the same time.In the literature, there is accumulating evidence that multimodal information about an object's location can lead to a reduction of the response latency and to an improvement of localization accuracy. For example, it has been shown that a motor response toward a visual target can be made with a shorter latency when this target is accompanied by an auditory signal at the same location. Simon and Craft (1970)

While firing rate is well established as a relevant parameter for encoding information exchanged between neurons, the significance of other parameters is more conjectural. Here, we show that regularity of neuronal spike activities affects sensorimotor processing in tottering mutants, which suffer from a mutation in P/Q-type voltage-gated calcium channels. While the modulation amplitude of the simple spike firing rate of their floccular Purkinje cells during optokinetic stimulation is indistinguishable from that of wild-types, the regularity of their firing is markedly disrupted. The gain and phase values of tottering's compensatory eye movements are indistinguishable from those of flocculectomized wild-types or from totterings with the flocculus treated with P/Q-type calcium channel blockers. Moreover, normal eye movements can be evoked in tottering when the flocculus is electrically stimulated with regular spike trains mimicking the firing pattern of normal simple spikes. This study demonstrates the importance of regularity of firing in Purkinje cells for neuronal information processing.

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Controversy exists as to the extent to which the saccadic system, adapted in the so-called 'gain-shortening paradigm' for a particular target configuration, transfers the resulting change in saccade metrics to saccades elicited under different circumstances. In order to further assess this problem, we investigated the properties of human saccadic eye movements after visually induced short-term adaptation under a variety of conditions. We observed that saccades both during and after the adaptation did not significantly change their main sequence properties with respect to the pre-adaptation baseline. Saccade velocity profiles remained normal throughout the experiment, and we obtained no evidence that correction saccades were gradually absorbed in the primary saccade. We found that the effect of the short-term adaptation on saccade metrics is not confined to the particular combination of initial eye position and spatial position of the visual target used to induce the adaptation response. Saccades elicited from different initial positions towards targets with the same retinotopic coordinates as in the adaptation phase yield the same level of adaptation. However, our findings indicate that adaptation is confined to a limited range of saccade vectors around the oculocentric coordinates of the adaptation target ('restricted adaptation field'). Smaller and larger saccades are endowed with significantly lower adaptation values. Moreover, two further experiments showed that a retinal stimulus is not a prerequisite for adaptation to express itself: First, in a double-step experiment, we dissociated the retinal stimulus vector from the required oculomotor response. Second, we also investigated the effect of visually induced adaptation on auditory evoked saccades. In both tasks the adaptation was transferred to the required motor response. Based on our findings, we conclude that short-term adaptation is expressed at a multisensory stage, where saccadic eye movements are represented as desired eye displacement vectors (motor error). Possible neurophysiological implications are discussed.

The ability to search and scan the environment effectively is a prerequisite for spatial behavior. A longstanding theory proposes that inhibition of previously attended loci (Inhibition of return; IOR) serves to facilitate exploration by increasing the likelihood to inspect new areas instead of returning to locations that have been inspected before. In this eye movement study we tested whether we could find evidence in favor of this hypothesis. Here we report that IOR does occur during search and free viewing, because we found increased fixation times preceding return saccades (eye movements that return to previously fixated locations). Meanwhile we observed no influence of IOR on the search strategy. Rather than the predicted low number we found many return saccades. Therefore, IOR does not serve as a foraging facilitator in saccadic search and free viewing. We hypothesize that IOR is an intrinsic aspect of shifting attention and gaze direction and furthermore that it is not always advantageous to prevent return saccades.

Patients with Hodgkin's disease can develop paraneoplastic cerebellar ataxia because of the generation of autoantibodies against mGluR1 (mGluR1-Abs). Yet, the pathophysiological mechanisms underlying their motor coordination deficits remain to be elucidated. Here, we show that application of IgG purified from the patients' serum to cerebellar slices of mice acutely reduces the basal activity of Purkinje cells, whereas application to the flocculus of mice in vivo evokes acute disturbances in the performance of their compensatory eye movements. In addition, the mGluR1-Abs block induction of long-term depression in cultured mouse Purkinje cells, whereas the cerebellar motor learning behavior of the patients is affected in that they show impaired adaptation of their saccadic eye movements. Finally, postmortem analysis of the cerebellum of a paraneoplastic cerebellar ataxia patient showed that the number of Purkinje cells was significantly reduced by approximately two thirds compared with three controls. We conclude that autoantibodies against mGluR1 can cause cerebellar motor coordination deficits caused by a combination of rapid effects on both acute and plastic responses of Purkinje cells and chronic degenerative effects.

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