TY  - JOUR
A1  - Goepel, Johanna
A1  - Biehl, Stefanie C.
A1  - Kissler, Johanna
A1  - Paul-Jordanov, Isabelle
T1  - Pro- and antisaccades in children elicited by visual and acoustic targets - does modality matter?
JF  - BMC Pediatrics
N2  - Background: 

Children are able to inhibit a prepotent reaction to suddenly arising visual stimuli, although this skill is not yet as pronounced as it is in adulthood. However, up to now the inhibition mechanism to acoustic stimuli has been scarcely investigated 

Methods: 

Reflexive (prosaccade) and inhibitory (antisaccade) responses to visual and acoustic targets were examined with an eye tracker system in 31 children between seven and twelve years of age using a gap-overlap task and two target eccentricities.

Results: 

Acoustically cued saccades had longer reaction times than visually cued saccades. A gap effect (i.e., shorter reaction time in the gap than the overlap condition) was only found for visually elicited saccades, whereas an eccentricity effect (i.e., faster saccades to more laterally presented targets - 12 degrees vs. 6 degrees or rather 90 degrees vs. 45 degrees) was only present in the acoustic condition. Longer reaction times of antisaccades compared to prosaccades were found only in the visual task. Across both tasks the typical pattern of elevated error rates in the antisaccade condition was found. Antisaccade errors declined with age, indicating an ongoing development of inhibitory functions. 

Conclusions: 

The present results lay the ground for further studies of acoustically triggered saccades in typically as well as atypically developing children and it might thus be possible to upgrade physiological diagnostic tools.
KW  - Saccadic eye-movements
KW  - Auditory targets
KW  - Voluntary control
KW  - Task-performance
KW  - Latency
KW  - Prosaccade
KW  - Vergence
KW  - Stimuli
KW  - GAP
Y1  - 2011
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-141807
VL  - 11
IS  - 116
ER  -