Abstract
Saccadic adaptation is a learning process that maintains the accuracy of eye movements to ensure effective perception of the environment. It is usually studied by shifting the target mid-flight during the saccade to introducing a consistent error to the visual system. In a prior study (Meermeier et al., J.Vis., 2016) we found that saccadic adaptation is stronger when human pictures are used as targets in comparison to noise stimuli. We attribute this difference to an intrinsic value in pictures of humans, and to a sensitivity of the saccadic system to the value of the target. To investigate whether a modulation of acquired extrinsic value could elicit the same effect, we compared saccadic adaptation towards high value and low value targets in expert players of the video game 'Candy Crush Saga'. As targets we chose 3x4 item-patterns that either allowed for a very rewarding move (high value targets) or that did not allow any rewarding move (low value targets). All other procedures matched the study by Meermeier et al. (2016). Twenty-eight subjects participated in two sessions of scanning outward adaptation. We computed saccadic amplitude change for the last 40 trials of a 200 trial adaptation phase. Amplitude change was 12.7% for the high value and 13.1% for the low value targets. Bayesian repeated measures Anova revealed evidence for the Null hypothesis (BF01 = 4.822) indicating that saccadic adaptation did not differ according to the extrinsic value of the target. A subsequent control experiment using human figures as stimuli again confirmed their effectiveness to modulate saccadic adaptation. We thus conclude that it is rather the intrinsic value of the image and maybe its social component that induces stronger saccadic adaptation.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017