Saccadic inhibition underlies the remote distractor effect

Abstract

The remote distractor effect is a robust finding whereby a saccade to a lateralised visual target is delayed by the simultaneous, or near simultaneous, onset of a distractor in the opposite hemifield. Saccadic inhibition is a more recently discovered phenomenon whereby a transient change to the scene during a visual task induces a depression in saccadic frequency beginning within 70 ms, and maximal around 90-100 ms. We assessed whether saccadic inhibition is responsible for the increase in saccadic latency induced by remote distractors. Participants performed a simple saccadic task in which the delay between target and distractor was varied between 0, 25, 50, 100 and 150 ms. Examination of the distributions of saccadic latencies showed that each distractor produced a discrete dip in saccadic frequency, time-locked to distractor onset, conforming closely to the character of saccadic inhibition. We conclude that saccadic inhibition underlies the remote distractor effect.

Saccadic Inhibition Reveals the Timing of Automatic and Voluntary Signals in the Human Brain

“…The data confirm that the precise behavioral signature of visual stimuli on saccade plans, known as saccadic inhibition (Reingold and Stampe, 2002;Buonocore and McIntosh, 2008;Edelman and Xu, 2009), is remarkably consistent across conditions and observers and reflects an automatic transient that is a normal part of the saccadic movement planning process. The critical features a model must contain to capture this behavior are lateral inhibition and a nonlinear input: a fast transient automatic phase followed by a selective phase.…”

“…This phenomenon, called "saccadic inhibition," was first reported in reading studies (Reingold and Stampe, 1999, 2004 and then shown to generalize to other eye movement tasks (Reingold and Stampe, 2002;Buonocore and McIntosh, 2008;Edelman and Xu, 2009). It is thought to arise through rapid visual input to, and inhibitory connections within, the superior colliculus (SC) Stampe, 2000, 2002).…”

Computational Modeling of Collicular Integration of Perceptual Responses and Attention in Microsaccades

“…Our model might be extended to the more general problem of saccadic inhibition (Reingold and Stampe, 2002;Buonocore and McIntosh, 2008), where a transient change of a scene display during a visual task induces a decrease in saccade rate. Solutions to the problem of integration of low-level perceptual signals (Martinez-Conde et al, 2000;Rucci and Casile, 2004;Hafed and Krauzlis, 2010) and top-down attention (Posner, 1980;Hafed et al, 2011) studied here in the context of microsaccades might contribute to other aspects of this long-standing issue in active vision (Findlay and Walker, 1999) and scene perception (Itti and Koch, 2001).…”

OpenSR: An Open-Source Stimulus-Response Testing Framework

“…A widely used paradigm investigates the latency of saccades (i.e., small jerky eye movements) for detecting peripheral stimuli during perceptual discrimination tasks (Deubel, 2008). This paradigm has been used to examine numerous variables, such as the effect of stimulus onset asynchrony (i.e., the time latency between the sequential presentation of stimuli) on saccade latencies and strategies (van Stockum, MacAskill, & Anderson, 2011); the ability for humans to perform voluntary saccade commands when presented with sudden visual stimuli at varying distances (Edelman & Xu, 2009) or to inhibit saccadic responses to visual distractors (Buonocore & McIntosh, 2008); and to investigate whether endogenous visual cues (e.g., an arrow, displayed at the center of the visual field, pointing with high probability to a possible target location)-expressed by voluntarily focusing attention on a specific location without making eye movements-can suppress exogenous cues that automatically capture attention (Koelewijn, Bronkhorst, & Theeuwes, 2009). In such experiments, eye movement is tracked and recorded as participants respond to a series of tasks in which stimuli are presented on a computer screen.…”