Control of saccadic latencies in a choice paradigm

Saccadic latencies are conventionally viewed as reflecting the accumulation of information during decision-making process but we have previously shown that latency distributions may be strongly affected by reinforcement contingencies (Madelain et al., 2007). Here, we probe the possibility to control saccadic latencies in a choice paradigm.

Six subjects made saccades toward a horizontally stepping target within 80-300ms. For each subject we constructed two classes of latencies, “short” and “long”, using the first and last quartiles (e.g. [80;151]ms and [185;300]ms respectively). We then