Reinforcement contingencies affect the allocation of saccades in time

Saccadic latencies are conventionally viewed as reflecting the accumulation of information during decision-making process (e.g. Carpenter and Williams, 1995) 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 within 80-300 ms following a target stepping horizontally by 10 deg between two fixed locations. For each subject we selected two classes of latencies, ‘short’ and ‘long’, using the first and last