Two patients with well defined lesions of midline cerebellar structures including the fastigial nuclei on both sides presented with saccadic hypermetria but well preserved smooth pursuit eye movements. This is a remarkable finding as the oculomotor vermis (lobules VI, VII) and the fastigial nucleus are known to play a part in the control of smooth pursuit eye movements and unilateral fastigial ...

IN A previous paper (FEINSTEIN and WILLIAMS, 1971) the relationship between the horizontal and vertical saccadic systems was examined. Results indicate that the two orthogonal saccadic systems share a common information processing channel. The series of experiments which are discussed in this paper, are intended to investigate the relationship between the horizontal saccadic and the vertical sm...

To understand how the CNS uses past experiences to generate movements that accommodate minute-by-minute environmental changes, we studied the trial-by-trial updating of the gain for initiating smooth pursuit eye movements and how this relates to the history of previous trials. Ocular responses in humans elicited by a small perturbing motion presented 300 ms after appearance of a target were use...

The appearance of a stationary but irrelevant cue triggers a smooth eye movement away from the position of the cue in monkeys that have been trained extensively to smoothly track the motion of moving targets while not making saccades to the stationary cue. We have analyzed the parameters that regulate the size of the cue-evoked smooth eye movement and examined whether presentation of the cue ch...

Missal, M. and S. J. Heinen. Supplementary eye fields stimulation facilitates anticipatory pursuit. J Neurophysiol 92: 1257–1262, 2004. First published March 10, 2004; 10.1152/jn.01255.2003. Anticipatory movements are motor responses occurring before likely sensory events in contrast to reflexive actions. Anticipatory movements are necessary to compensate for delays present in sensory and motor...

An evaluation of eye movements is very useful in neurological disorders but is complicated by issues such as maturation and lack of normative data in children. In order to address these issues we studied smooth pursuit eye movements of 65 normal children aged 7-11 years old. The gain of horizontal smooth pursuit (HSP) was higher than the gain of the vertical smooth pursuit (SP) and this differe...

Eye and head movements were measured in a group of infants at 2, 3, and 5 months of age as they were attentively tracking an object moving at 0.2 or 0.4 Hz in sinus or triangular mode. Smooth pursuit gain increased with age, especially until 3 months. At 2-3 months, the lag of the smooth pursuit was small for the sinusoidal motion but large for the triangular one. At 5 months, smooth pursuit wa...

Stationary and pursuit fixation may involve different fixation mechanisms that are reflected by differences in saccadic reaction times (SRTs). Gap, Simultaneous, and Overlap interval paradigms provided three distinct SRT ranges for comparisons between these two viewing conditions. SRTs following pursuit fixation were longer than following stationary fixation, but were similarly affected by the ...

It is well known that cerebellar dysfunction can lead to an impairment of eye velocity during sustained pursuit tracking of continuously moving visual target. We have now studied the initiation of smooth pursuit eye movements towards predictable and randomized visual step-ramp stimuli in six patients with degenerative cerebellar lesions and six age-matched healthy controls using the magnetic sc...

PURPOSE Several behavioral studies have shown that the reaction times of visually guided movements are slower in people with amblyopia, particularly during amblyopic eye viewing. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the initiation of smooth pursuit eye movements, which are responsible for accurately keeping moving objects on the fovea, is delayed in people with anisometropic amblyopia. METHODS...