TY - JOUR
T1 - Oculomotor freezing reflects tactile temporal expectation and aids tactile perception
AU - Badde, Stephanie
AU - Myers, Caroline F.
AU - Yuval-Greenberg, Shlomit
AU - Carrasco, Marisa
N1 - Funding Information:
This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health R01-EY019693 and NEI R21-EY026185 to M.C. and by the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation grant 2015201 to S.Y.G. and M.C. We thank Dekel Abeles and members of the Carrasco Lab, especially Rachel Denison, Nina Hanning, and Mariel Roberts for helpful comments on the paper, and Karen Tian for help with figure preparation.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Author(s).
PY - 2020/12/1
Y1 - 2020/12/1
N2 - The oculomotor system keeps the eyes steady in expectation of visual events. Here, recording microsaccades while people performed a tactile, frequency discrimination task enabled us to test whether the oculomotor system shows an analogous preparatory response for unrelated tactile events. We manipulated the temporal predictability of tactile targets using tactile cues, which preceded the target by either constant (high predictability) or variable (low predictability) time intervals. We find that microsaccades are inhibited prior to tactile targets and more so for constant than variable intervals, revealing a tight crossmodal link between tactile temporal expectation and oculomotor action. These findings portray oculomotor freezing as a marker of crossmodal temporal expectation. Moreover, microsaccades occurring around the tactile target presentation are associated with reduced task performance, suggesting that oculomotor freezing mitigates potential detrimental, concomitant effects of microsaccades and revealing a crossmodal coupling between tactile perception and oculomotor action.
AB - The oculomotor system keeps the eyes steady in expectation of visual events. Here, recording microsaccades while people performed a tactile, frequency discrimination task enabled us to test whether the oculomotor system shows an analogous preparatory response for unrelated tactile events. We manipulated the temporal predictability of tactile targets using tactile cues, which preceded the target by either constant (high predictability) or variable (low predictability) time intervals. We find that microsaccades are inhibited prior to tactile targets and more so for constant than variable intervals, revealing a tight crossmodal link between tactile temporal expectation and oculomotor action. These findings portray oculomotor freezing as a marker of crossmodal temporal expectation. Moreover, microsaccades occurring around the tactile target presentation are associated with reduced task performance, suggesting that oculomotor freezing mitigates potential detrimental, concomitant effects of microsaccades and revealing a crossmodal coupling between tactile perception and oculomotor action.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-020-17160-1
DO - 10.1038/s41467-020-17160-1
M3 - Article
C2 - 32620746
AN - SCOPUS:85087392177
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 11
JO - Nature communications
JF - Nature communications
IS - 1
M1 - 3341
ER -