Eye-hand coupling before saccadic eye movement

We examined the nature of eye-hand coupling for the fast correction of on-going arm reaching movements in response to an abrupt target jump. We found a significant correlation between the onset times of eye and arm responses. Importantly, the initial component of the reaching correction was affected by a saccade occurrence even though the onset of reaching correction was prior to the saccade onset. This result would exclude the possibility of causal effect of eye movement execution on the arm response initiation, and instead support the idea of a shared neural mechanism for the preparation (or modulation) processes of saccades and reaching corrections. Keywords— Automatic pilot, Implicit motor control, Eye-hand coordination