Comparison of horizontal head movements evoked by auditory and visual targets

Head movement propensity - the pattern of head saccades dependent on methods of target presentation-varies among individuals. The present group of 9 young adults was previously ranked in a visual saccadic task according to this propensity. The present report examines how and why this propensity changes if the saccades are made to auditory targets. 1) Spatially identical, interleaved, auditorily and visually elicited horizontal saccadic gaze shifts (jumps) differed in amplitude and in starting and/or ending position. The jumps were executed in two head movement modes: first, the non-aligned mode was a standard reaction-time single gaze step between two points. Second, the head-aligned mode required alignment of the head with the fixation (starting) point; thereafter both modes were identical. All results in the auditory task are expressed relative to the visual results. 2) In the non-aligned mode, head movement amplitudes were increased on average by 15% (for example, an 80 degrees jump elicited a 12 degrees larger head movement), and velocity decreased by 12%, reflecting the increased demands of the auditory task. More importantly, the differences between subjects was narrowed; that is, head movement propensity was homogenized in the auditory task. In the visual task, head-movers willingly move their heads off and across the midline, whereas non-movers are unwilling to leave the midline from eccentric starting points or to eccentric ending points. This is called the midline attraction effect and was previously linked to spatial reference frames. The homogenization in the auditory task was characterized by head-movers increasing, and non-movers decreasing, their midline attraction, suggesting altered spatial reference frames. 3) For heuristic purposes, the ideal head-mover is defined by a gain of 1.0 in the visual task, and by external earth-fixed reference frames. Similarly, the ideal non-mover has a gain of 0.0 and has a bias toward body (or some part of the body)-fixed reference frames. In the auditory task these gains (and reference frames) in head-movers and non-movers are homogenized (closer to 0.5), either by the participation of the head (movement of the ears in space) in sensory acquisition or by differences in central nervous processing of the two modalities, or both.