Quantitative differences in smooth pursuit and saccadic eye movements

Recently it has been suggested that smooth pursuit (SP) and saccadic (SAC) eye movements share many common brain substrates in the planning and control of eye movements (Krauzlis in J Neurophysiol 91:591–603, 2004). Evidence is mounting that these two types of eye movements may also share similar mechanisms used to drive both reactive and predictive eye movement responses (Missal and Keller in J Neurophysiol 88:1880–1892, 2002, Keller and Missal in Ann NY Acad Sci 1004:29–39, 2003). The objective of this study was to quantify these similarities by establishing whether the behavioural response properties of human eye movements to predictive (PRD) and randomized (RND) conditions are quantitatively similar for both SP and SAC in directly comparable paradigms. Two previous studies have attempted to evaluate the coordination and motor preparation time of SP and saccadic eye movements (Erkelens in Vis Res 46:163–170, 2006; Joiner and Shelhamer in Exp Brain Res, Epub ahead of print, 2006). However, no previous study has quantitatively evaluated PRD and RND conditions to discretely presented SP and SAC tasks. We used simple SAC and SP paradigms in blocks of PRD and RND presentations, with eye movements monitored throughout using an IR-limbus eye-tracking system (Skalar). Twelve normal subjects (aged between 20 and 39 years) participated in the study which took place over two recording sessions, on two separate days. Data were analysed for two main comparable descriptive statistics: latency and eye velocity/displacement gain. The results presented here support the notion that SP and SAC share common brain substrates/mechanisms in the generation of responses to PRD and RND visual targets but differ in the movement preparation time.