Contextual control of saccadic reaction times using a latency-contingent paradigm

Because saccades are used to acquire information localized in our visual environment they are conventionally regarded as being exclusively concerned with the spatial position of objects. However, recent studies have shown that they are also affected by the temporal regularities in dynamic environments. Here we ask whether contextual control of latencies in a search task can be established using reinforcement learning. 

Five subjects made saccades within 80-750ms toward a target displayed among distractors. For each subject we constructed two classes of latencies, “short” and “long”, using the