Abstract
We often shfit our gaze to an interesting stimulus; but it is important to inhibit eye movemens in some environments (e.g. no-look pass in basket ball). Here, we tested our ability in this goal-directed inhibition when participants had to report peripheral target stimulus in the cued location. We measured eye movements while participants were performing a cued-matching task. An array of eight letters composed of four characters was briefly presented and participants reported the item presented at the cued location under the instruction of maintaining strict fixatoin at the cetrally presented fixation cross. Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) determining the cue to target array interval was chosen from six values (-400, -200, 0, 200, 400 and 800 ms), resulting in pre-cue conditions (-400 and -200 ms SOA), a simultaneous cue condition (0 ms SOA) and post-cue conditions (200, 400 and 800 ms SOA). Results show that participants shifted their gaze toward the cued direction even though the target array was absent at the onset of eye movements. The eye movements have the following characteristics. First, eye movements were shifted to the cued location, but their amplitudes on average were considerably smaller than the actual location of the target item. Second, eye movements occurred approximately 300 ms from the cue onset in the simultaneous and post-cue conditions, but 200 ms from the memory array onset in the pre-cue conditions. Third, the magnitude of eye movements was on average similar under different cue conditions. However, in the post-cue conditions, the magnitude was larger in the incorrect trials than in the correct trials while their onsets were similar. These results demonstrate that eye movements often escape our inhibitory control.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016