Development of prosaccade and antisaccade task performance in participants aged 6 to 26 years

Abstract

There are few studies on the development of oculomotor functions during childhood. B. Fischer, M. Biscaldi, and S. Gezeck (1997) reported improvement of antisaccade task performance between ages 6 and 16 years. The present study is a replication and extension of those results. In three age groups (6-7, 10-11, 18-26 years), saccades during pro- and antisaccade tasks with 200-ms gap and overlap and during a fixation task were measured. Adults exhibited faster saccades and less prosaccades during the antisaccade tasks than 10-11-year-old children; these two groups had faster saccades during all tasks and less prosaccades during the anti- and the fixation task than 6-7-year-old subjects. Both children groups made more express saccades than adults. Results suggest different degrees of age-related improvement for different saccadic parameters, the effects being greatest for prosaccade inhibition during the antisaccade task and in line with the assumed protracted development of prefrontal functions.

Unique saccadic abilities associated with tourette syndrome: Pure and comorbid groups a controlled study

“…3A). Earlier reports have also observed significant reductions in antisaccade error rates in an Overlap condition relative to those in a Gap condition in healthy participants (Fischer and Weber, 1992;Fischer & Weber, 1997;Klein & Foerster, 2001). In the presents study, the TSþADHD group was not able to reduce their antisaccade error rates in the Overlap800 condition and their error rates remained similar in all three conditions.…”

Measuring attentional bias to threat in children and adolescents: A matter of speed?

“…Future research on biases in attentional processing of threat might benefit from using paradigms that depend less upon reaction times. There is a wealth of experimental tasks that can be adapted for this purpose, such as the attentional blink task (Anderson, 2005), the antisaccade paradigm (Klein & Foerster, 2001), and the recently developed perceptual accuracy version of the spatial cueing paradigm (Van Damme et al, 2008).…”

The antisaccade task as a research tool in psychopathology: A critical review

“…Recent studies using large samples suggest an error rate of around 20% is typical (Ettinger et al, 2003a(Ettinger et al, , 2005bSmyrnis et al, 2002; Tatler & Hutton, in submission; see also Everling & Fischer, 1998). Error rates are not constant across the lifespan, being highest during childhood, reaching a nadir during early adulthood and then increasing very slowly with advancing age until around 60, when the rate of increase appears to accelerate (Fischer, Biscaldi, & Gezeck, 1997;Klein & Foerster, 2001;Olincy, Ross, Youngd, & Freedman, 1997). The developmental profile of antisaccade errors is thus broadly consistent with the known development of the prefrontal cortex.…”