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Response suppression produces a switch-cost for spatially compatible saccades

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Abstract

Executive function supports the rapid alternation between tasks for online reconfiguration of attentional and motor goals. The oculomotor literature has found that a prosaccade (i.e., saccade to veridical target location) preceded by an antisaccade (i.e., saccade mirror symmetrical to a target) elicits an increase in reaction time (RT), whereas the converse switch does not. This switch-cost has been attributed to the antisaccade task’s requirement of inhibiting a prosaccade (i.e., response suppression) and transforming a target’s coordinate (i.e., vector inversion)—executive processes thought to contribute to a task-set inertia that proactively interferes with the planning of a subsequent prosaccade. It is, however, unclear whether response suppression and vector inversion contribute to a task-set inertia or whether the phenomenon relates to a unitary component (e.g., response suppression). Here, the same stimulus-driven (SD) prosaccades (i.e., respond at target onset) as used in previous work were used with minimally delayed (MD) prosaccades (i.e., respond at target offset) and arranged in an AABB paradigm (i.e., A = SD prosaccade, B = MD prosaccade). MD prosaccades provide the same response suppression as antisaccades without the need for vector inversion. RTs for SD task-switch trials were longer and more variable than their task-repeat counterparts, whereas values for MD task-switch and task-repeat trials did not reliably differ. Moreover, SD task-repeat and task-switch movement times and amplitudes did not vary and thus demonstrate that a switch-cost is unrelated to a speed accuracy trade-off. Accordingly, results suggest the executive demands of response suppression is sufficient to engender the persistent activation of a non-standard task-set that selectively delays the planning of a subsequent SD prosaccade.

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Notes

  1. Barton and Manoach’s group (e.g., Barton et al. 2006) have reported that an antisaccade delays the RT of any subsequent pro- or antisaccade. Notably, however, Barton and Manoach’s group employed a cued saccade paradigm wherein two targets were concurrently presented left and right of a central fixation and remained visible throughout a response. In contrast, our group as well as Chan and DeSouza (2013), have employed a classic antisaccade paradigm (Hallett 1978) wherein a single target is exogenously presented and therefore requires the sensorimotor transformation of a target’s coordinates to mirror-symmetrical space (i.e., vector inversion) (see Munoz and Everling 2004). This difference in methodology has been discussed in depth elsewhere (Weiler and Heath 2012a, b, 2014b) and we believe that it provides a parsimonious account for the difference in experimental findings.

  2. For simplicity we henceforth use saccade – instead of prosaccade – to refer to a SR compatible response.

  3. Correlations computed separately for SD and MD trials showed that foreperiod durations and RTs were not reliably related (ps > 0.40).

  4. The text boxes in the main panels of Fig. 2 present skewness (g1) for each experimental condition and demonstrate a positive skew for each. We therefore employed median RT and RT IQR values in our ANOVA model. Notably, however, analysis of mean RT also revealed a task by task-transition interaction, F(1,18) = 7.76, p = 0. 012, ηp2 = 0.30. RTs for SD task-repeat and task-switch trials differed (t(18) = 3.48, p  = 0.003, d = 0.80), whereas MD task-switch and task-repeat did not (t(18) = − 0.31, p = 0 .075, d = − 0.07).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Discovery Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, and Faculty Scholar and Major Academic Development Fund Awards from the University of Western Ontario. The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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  1. School of Kinesiology, The University of Western Ontario, London, ON, N6A 3K7, Canada

    Benjamin Tari, Mohammed A. Fadel & Matthew Heath

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  1. Benjamin Tari
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  2. Mohammed A. Fadel
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Correspondence to Matthew Heath.

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Tari, B., Fadel, M.A. & Heath, M. Response suppression produces a switch-cost for spatially compatible saccades. Exp Brain Res 237, 1195–1203 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-019-05497-z

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