Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

The Limitations of Reward Effects on Saccade Latencies: An Exploration of Task-Specificity and Strength

Dunne, S; Ellison, A; Smith, D.T.

The Limitations of Reward Effects on Saccade Latencies: An Exploration of Task-Specificity and Strength Thumbnail


Authors

S Dunne



Abstract

Saccadic eye movements are simple, visually guided actions. Operant conditioning of specific saccade directions can reduce the latency of eye movements in the conditioned direction. However, it is not clear to what extent this learning transfers from the conditioned task to novel tasks. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the effects of operant conditioning of prosaccades to specific spatial locations would transfer to more complex oculomotor behaviours, specifically, prosaccades made in the presence of a distractor (Experiment 1) and antisaccades (Experiment 2). In part 1 of each experiment, participants were rewarded for making a saccade to one hemifield. In both experiments, the reward produced a significant facilitation of saccadic latency for prosaccades directed to the rewarded hemifield. In part 2, rewards were withdrawn, and the participant made a prosaccade to targets that were accompanied by a contralateral distractor (Experiment 1) or an antisaccade (Experiment 2). There were no hemifield-specific effects of the reward on saccade latency on the remote distractor effect or antisaccades, although the reward was associated with an overall slowing of saccade latency in Experiment 1. These data indicate that operant conditioning of saccadic eye movements does not transfer to similar but untrained tasks. We conclude that rewarding specific spatial locations is unlikely to induce long-term, systemic changes to the human oculomotor system.

Citation

Dunne, S., Ellison, A., & Smith, D. (2019). The Limitations of Reward Effects on Saccade Latencies: An Exploration of Task-Specificity and Strength. Vision, 3(2), Article 20. https://doi.org/10.3390/vision3020020

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date May 9, 2019
Online Publication Date May 11, 2019
Publication Date Jun 30, 2019
Deposit Date Jun 20, 2019
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Vision
Publisher MDPI
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 3
Issue 2
Article Number 20
DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/vision3020020
Keywords Saccade; Conditioning; Reward; Learning; Distractor; Remote distractor; Antisaccade; Oculomotor; Attention

Files

Published Journal Article (3.1 Mb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).





You might also like



Downloadable Citations