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Probability-dependent anticipatory eye movements across development
Anna Montagnini, Chloé Pasturel, Christine Deruelle, Guillaume S. Masson
Date / Location: Monday, 11 July 2022 / S03-185
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Humans exploit regularities in their environment to efficiently anticipate and react to expected events. In healthy adults, regularities in a visual object’s motion can elicit anticipatory smooth eye movements (ASEM) towards the expected movement direction, with ASEM velocity proportional to direction probability. Such exquisite adaptive behaviour relies on the efficient integration of probabilistic information across different time scales, and on the transformation of this memory signal into the appropriate motor command. Both these functions are plausibly dependent on the cortical pre-frontal network, which is known to complete its maturation around 25 years. Here we investigated whether probability-dependent ASEM are already present during childhood and adolescence. We recorded eye movements in a large group of participants (N=109, 7-21 years old), instructed to accurately track a small target moving horizontally. The probability p of target motion direction (Right/Left) was changed at different moments during the session. We report robust probability-dependent ASEM for all subjects, including at the youngest age. However, the sensitivity to the probability bias (as quantified by the slope of the linear regression of ASEM-velocity upon p) increases significantly with age. Importantly, this difference cannot be attributed to a general lower performance in smooth eye tracking at early stages of development, as all the parameters of visually-guided eye movements (with the exception of latency) were overall comparable across participants. We speculate that the children’s lower sensitivity to the environment’s regularities for visuomotor adaptation might be related to a less precise (noisier) information-processing pipeline, rather than to oculomotor control deficits.