The antisaccade task: Visual distractors elicit a location-independent planning 'cost'
Abstract
Prosaccades are rapid eye movements with direct stimulus and response relations and are designed to bring the fovea onto a target or area of interest. In contrast, antisaccades require the inhibition of a prosaccade and the evocation of a saccade to a target’s mirror-symmetrical location. Previous work has shown that a remote (i.e., midline, contralateral) – but not proximal (i.e., ipsilateral) – task-irrelevant distractor relative to a visual target delays prosaccade reaction times (RT) (i.e., remote distractor effect: RDE). To my knowledge, however, no work has examined whether antisaccade RTs are similarly influenced by a RDE. Accordingly, I sought to determine whether planning costs for antisaccades are similarly dependent on the location-specific presentation of a distractor. In Chapter Two, I demonstrate increased antisaccade RTs independent of the spatial location of a distractor. Based on this result, I concluded that distractor-related antisaccade costs reflect the top-down evocation of explicit response-selection rules.