involuntary responses

Faces influence saccade programming

Several studies have showed that face stimuli elicit extremely fast and involuntary saccadic responses toward them, relative to other categories of visual stimuli. In the talk, I will mainly focus on a quite recent research done in our team that investigated to what extent face stimuli influence the programming and execution of saccades. In this research, two experiments were performed using a saccadic choice task: two images (one with a face, one with a vehicle) were simultaneously displayed in the left and right visual fields of participants who had to execute a saccade toward the image (Experiment 1) or toward a cross added in the center of the image (Experiment 2) containing a target stimulus (a face or a vehicle). As expected participants were faster to execute a saccade toward a face than toward a vehicle and did less errors. We also observed shorter saccades toward vehicle than face targets, even if participants were explicitly asked to perform their saccades toward a specific location (Experiment 2). Further analyses, that I will detailed in the talk, showed that error saccades might be interrupted in mid-fight to initiate a concurrently programmed corrective saccade.