Adaptation of Reactive Saccades is Influenced by Unconscious Priming of the Attention Focus

ABSTRACT

The authors investigated whether the size of the attention focus can influence saccadic adaptation, and whether this influence changes in older age. Using the scrambled sentence task, young and older participants were either primed for a wide attention focus, or primed of a narrow attention focus, or were not primed for any specific attention focus. Subsequently, all participants underwent a double-step saccadic adaptation paradigm aimed at changing the direction of reflexive saccades. The authors found that compared to the nonprimed control group, priming for a wide attention focus enhanced saccadic adaptation in both age groups by a similar amount; the benefit persisted throughout the adaptation phase, but was absent during the deadaptation phase. In contrast, the authors found no effects of priming with a narrow attention focus on saccadic adaptation. From this the authors conclude that a wide attention focus is beneficial for workaround strategies but not for adaptive recalibration, and that those benefits are similar in young and older persons.

Keywords:

• double-step adaptation
• saccade adaptation
• spatial selective attention

NOTE

Notes

1. We decided to use a constant interstep interval of 200 ms rather than a saccade-triggered interval to remain consistent with our other studies on saccade adaptation, where a constant interval was needed to ensure similarity for eye and arm adaptation (Bock, Schmitz, & Grigorova, 2008), as well as with our recent work on the priming of age stereotypes for saccade adaptation (Bock, Grigorova, & Ilieva, 2013). Speed and magnitude of adaptation, as well as the magnitude of aftereffects, were all found comparable for constant and for saccade-triggered intervals (Grigorova, Bock, Borisova, Ilieva, & Schmitz, 2010).