Accuracy of visually and memory-guided antisaccades in man

Abstract

Primary saccades to remembered targets are generally not precise, but rather undershoot target position. The major source of this saccadic undershoot may be (a) a memory-related process or (b) a poor spatial resolution in those processes which transfer the retinotopic target information into an intermediate memory-linked representation of space. The aim of this study was to investigate whether distortions of eye positions in the antisaccade task, which are characterized by inherent co-ordinate transformation processes, may completely account for the spatial inaccuracies of memory-guided antisaccades. The results show that the spatial inaccuracy of primary and secondary eye movements in the visually guided antisaccade task was comparable to that in the memory-guided antisaccade task. In both conditions, the direction error component was less dysmetric than the amplitude error component. Secondary eye movements were significantly corrective. This increase of eye position accuracy was achieved by reducing the amplitude error only. It is concluded from this study that at least some of the distortion of memory-guided saccades is due to inaccuracies in the sensorimotor co-ordinate transformations.