Ocular tracking of moving targets: effects of perturbing the background.

Primates are able to track a moving target with their eyes, even when the target is seen against a stationary textured background. In this situation, the tracking eye movement induces motion of the background images on the retina (reafference) that competes with the motion of the target's retinal image, potentially disrupting the tracking of the target. Previous work on humans reported that brief perturbations of the background in the opposite direction to pursuit were much less disruptive than perturbations in the same direction as pursuit.

Temporospatial properties of the effects of bottom-up attention on smooth pursuit initiation in humans.

We examined the temporal and spatial properties of the effects of target saliency on the initiation of smooth pursuit eye movement in humans. Visual stimuli consisted of random dots projected on a large-field screen. During a fixation period, a cluster of dots (2 x 2 deg) was blinked (turned off for a short period) to make that region stand out from the remaining background and serve as a cue.

Effect of target saliency on human smooth pursuit initiation: interocular transfer.

Our previous study showed that the saliency of a target increases the gain of smooth pursuit initiation. In this study, we examined the interocular transfer of this effect in five humans. A square red frame surrounding the target was used as a cue to indicate the initial target position.