Averaging saccades are repelled by prior uninformative cues at both short and long intervals
When two spatially proximal stimuli are presented simultaneously, a first saccade is often directed to an intermediate location between the stimuli (averaging saccade). In an earlier study, Watanabe (2001) showed that, at a long cue–target onset asynchrony (CTOA; 600 ms), uninformative
cues not only slowed saccadic response times (SRTs) to targets presented at the cued location in single target trials (inhibition of return, IOR), but also biased averaging saccades away from the cue in double target trials. The present study replicated Watanabe's experimental task with a
short CTOA (50 ms), as well as with mixed short (50 ms) and long (600 ms) CTOAs. In all conditions on double target trials, uninformative cues robustly biased averaging saccades away from cued locations. Although SRTs on single target trials were delayed at previously cued locations at both
CTOAs when they were mixed, this delay was not observed in the blocked, short CTOA condition. We suggest that top-down factors, such as expectation and attentional control settings, may have asymmetric effects on the temporal and spatial dynamics of oculomotor processing.
Keywords: Attention; Inhibition of return; Saccade averaging
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: 1: Department of Cognitive Psychology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 2: Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada 3: Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Publication date: 01 August 2012
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