Impact of task-specific training on saccadic eye movement performance

Prosaccades are saccadic eye movements made reflexively in response to the sudden appearance of visual stimuli, whereas antisaccades are saccades that are directed to a location opposite a stimulus. Bibi and Edelman (Bibi R, Edelman JA. J Neurophysiol 102: 3101-3110, 2009) demonstrated that decreases in reaction time resulting from training prosaccades along one spatial axis (horizontal or vertical) could transfer to prosaccades made along the other axis. To help determine whether visual or motor-related processes underlie this facilitation, in the present study we trained participants to make prosaccades and probed their performance (reaction time, error rate) on antisaccade trials and vice versa. Subjects were probed for the effects of training on saccade performance before, during, and after 12 sessions of training. Training on prosaccades improved performance on both pro- and antisaccade tasks. Antisaccade training, with either a classic step task or a gap task, improved performance on gap prosaccades, though by less than it improved antisaccade performance, but had limited effect on an overlap prosaccade task. Across all subjects, training on one task only rarely had an adverse impact on an untrained task. These findings suggest that the predominant effect of saccade training is to facilitate fixation disengagement and motor preparation processes while having little impact on visual input to the saccadic system. NEW & NOTEWORTHY This is the first systematic examination of whether training of prosaccades and antisaccades is task specific or instead transfers to the other saccade type. It finds that training tends to improve performance of all saccade types tested. These behavioral results provide insight into saccade neurophysiology, suggesting that saccade training enhances processes related to motor excitation and inhibition.