Adaptive plasticity in the human saccade system
Item
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Title
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Adaptive plasticity in the human saccade system
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:d074e460e438:11532
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identifier
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11968
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Creator
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Herman, James P.,
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Contributor
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Jonathan B. Levitt | Josh Wallman
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Biology | Neurosciences | eye movements | motor learning | plasticity | saccades
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Abstract
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The rapid point-to-point movements of the eyes called saccades are some of the most commonly made by humans, yet differ from nearly every other type of motor output in that they are completed too quickly to be adjusted during their execution by visual feedback. Yet, saccadic accuracy remains quite high over a lifetime despite inevitable changes to the physical structures controlling the eyes, indicating that the oculomotor system actively monitors and adjusts motor commands to achieve this consistent behavioral production. Indeed, it seems that beyond the ability to compensate for slow, age-related bodily changes, saccades can be modified following traumatic injury or pathology that affects their production, or in response to more short-term systematic alterations to post-saccadic visual feedback in a lab setting. It is, in fact, thought that all of these forms of plasticity rely on the visual detection of accuracy errors by a unified set of mechanisms that support the process known as saccade adaptation. A great deal has been learned about saccade adaptation, as it has been extensively studied as a phenomenon in its own right, as well as being used to explore the process of motor learning in general. However, many fundamental questions about saccade adaptation remain unanswered, often related to the way that saccade adaptation might operate in the natural environment with substantially more complex visual stimuli than are generally used in the lab. Here, we addressed these questions with (in some cases original) variants and more conventional examples of the frequently used intrasaccadic target step (ISS) paradigm (in which an experimenter causes saccadic error by shifting a target during the movement). By exploring the responses to whole-field-ISSs, we have inferred that saccade adaptation might be supported by a trans-saccadic integration mechanism, and may be sensitive to intrasaccadic motion signals. Challenging the oculomotor system by confronting it with multiple post-saccadic targets has revealed that saccade adaptation can occur in a target-identity specific manner, so that even if post-saccadic error varies from trial-to-trial, adaptation seems to reflect the average behavior of the target. At a more basic level, we systematically varied ISSs to determine the lower limits of the oculomotor system's sensitivity to intrasaccadic displacement during adaptation. Also at a more basic level, we looked at the effects of rendering post-saccadic feedback more intermittent during adaptation, finding it to have little effect on the magnitude or rate of adaptive dynamics, similar to other forms of motor learning but somewhat dissimilar from operant conditioning. These experiments also furnished a useful setting to develop and test a novel model of saccade adaptation which more explicitly relies on post-saccadic sensory prediction than previous models, but that is nonetheless in keeping with the ethos of modern motor learning theory. Finally, we found that the establishment and maintenance of a context for saccadic performance by adaptation could be achieved by consistently pairing a target's visual-identity with a specific ISS, extending what had been previously recognized as constituting a cue for contextual motor learning. In general, our results suggest that saccade adaptation is a highly flexible mechanism that not only supports the maintenance of accuracy, but also makes use of a wide range of brain functions to deftly tailor saccadic behavior contingent on task demands.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Biology
