Topic: smooth pursuit

Smooth pursuit eye movements are among our most intriguing motor behaviors. They are able to keep the line of sight on smoothly moving targets with little or no overt effort or deliberate planning, and they can respond quickly and accurately to changes in the trajectory of motion of targets. Nevertheless, despite these seeming automatic characteristics, pursuit is highly sensitive to high-level factors, such as the choices made about attention, or beliefs about the direction of upcoming motion. Investigators have struggled for decades with the problem of incorporating both high- and low-lev

During smooth pursuit, the oculomotor system needs to multi-task: eye velocity is adjusted to keep the moving stimulus on the fovea; in case of target blanking or loss of foveation, saccades are performed to catch up with the target. Mathematical models can be used to implement a quantitative description of underlying processes. Thus, models can provide insight by identifying parameters related to the physiological mechanisms (like pursuit gain or retinal delay).Here, we adapted a one-dimensional oculomotor model (Marti et al. 2008) to a two-dimensional pursuit task with target blanking (see f