Pro- and Antisaccades: Dissociating Stimulus and Response Influences the Online Control of Saccade Trajectories

The authors examined whether the diminished online control of antisaccades is related to a trade-off between movement planning and control or the remapping of target properties to a mirror-symmetrical location (i.e., vector inversion). Pro- and antisaccades were examined in a standard no-delay schedule wherein target onset served as the movement imperative and a delay cuing schedule wherein responses were initiated 2,000 ms following target onset. Importantly, the delay cuing schedule was employed to equate pro- and antisaccade reaction times. Online control was evaluated by indexing the strength of trajectory amendments at normalized increments of movement time. Antisaccades exhibited fewer online corrections than prosaccades, and this result was consistent across cuing schedules. Thus, the diminished online control of antisaccades cannot be tied to a trade-off between movement planning and control. Rather, the authors propose that the intentional nature of dissociating stimulus and response (i.e., vector inversion) engenders a slow mode of cognitive control that is not optimized for fast oculomotor corrections.