TY  - JOUR
A1  - Huestegge, Lynn
A1  - Herbort, Oliver
A1  - Gosch, Nora
A1  - Kunde, Wilfried
A1  - Pieczykolan, Aleks
T1  - Free-choice saccades and their underlying determinants: explorations of high-level voluntary oculomotor control
JF  - Journal of Vision
N2  - Models of eye-movement control distinguish between different control levels, ranging from automatic (bottom-up, stimulus-driven selection) and automatized (based on well-learned routines) to voluntary (top-down, goal-driven selection, e.g., based on instructions). However, one type of voluntary control has yet only been examined in the manual and not in the oculomotor domain, namely free-choice selection among arbitrary targets, that is, targets that are of equal interest from both a bottom-up and top-down processing perspective. Here, we ask which features of targets (identity- or location-related) are used to determine such oculomotor free-choice behavior. In two experiments, participants executed a saccade to one of four peripheral targets in three different choice conditions: unconstrained free choice, constrained free choice based on target identity (color), and constrained free choice based on target location. The analysis of choice frequencies revealed that unconstrained free-choice selection closely resembled constrained choice based on target location. The results suggest that free-choice oculomotor control is mainly guided by spatial (location-based) target characteristics. We explain these results by assuming that participants tend to avoid less parsimonious recoding of target-identity representations into spatial codes, the latter being a necessary prerequisite to configure oculomotor commands.
KW  - Adolescent
KW  - Stimulation
KW  - Adult
KW  - Eye Movements/physiology
KW  - Female
KW  - Humans
KW  - Learning/physiology
KW  - Male
KW  - Oculomotor Muscles/physiology
KW  - Photic
KW  - Choice Behavior/physiology
KW  - Psychomotor Performance/physiology
KW  - Saccades/physiology
KW  - Young Adult
KW  - eye movement
KW  - saccades
KW  - free choice
KW  - top-down processing
KW  - bottom-up processing
KW  - control levels
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-201493
VL  - 19
IS  - 3
ER  -