We are participating in this year’s European Conference on Eye Movements, which is taking place in Wuppertal, Germany.
Antimo is presenting new results on smooth pursuit eye movements, and how they may be affected by visual transients. In his experiments, Antimo is finding that smooth pursuit initiation is affected in a transient inhibitory manner if visual onsets occur near the beginning of an eye movement. This is an analog of saccadic inhibition phenomena, which are known to take place for rapid saccadic eye movements. We also found that catch-up saccades during smooth pursuit eye movements are temporally reset by visual transients, much like microsaccades during gaze fixation. These results allow us to constrain our understanding of the neural mechanisms for generating both saccades and smooth pursuit eye movements.