The effects of preceding moving stimuli on the initial part of smooth pursuit eye movement

We examined whether there are any adaptive effects on the pursuit initiation after a prolonged exposure to moving visual stimuli. The eye movements of six human subjects were recorded with the scleral search-coil technique or a Dual Purkinje Image Eye-tracker system. A random-dot image appeared on a CRT monitor and moved coherently in one direction (rightward or leftward) at 10 deg/s for 4 s, while the subject fixated on a stationary target (conditioning stimulus). The screen was blanked for 0.2 s, and then the target stepped to the right or left of the center and moved 10 deg/s leftward or rightward. We measured change in the eye position over the open-loop period of the pursuit initiation. When the pursuit target moved in the same direction as the preceding visual stimulus, a significant reduction in the initial tracking responses (55.9% decrease on average) was found. We then studied in detail the properties of the motion adaptation in pursuit initiation by varying the visual conditions systematically and obtained the following findings. When the subjects tracked the target that moved at 10 deg/s, the pursuit initiation was affected not only by the conditioning stimulus of the same speed as the target, but also by those of different speeds. Further, the conditioning stimulus moving at 10 deg/s affected the pursuit initiation not only when the target moved with the same speed but also when it moved at different speeds (more remarkable for slower speeds). The effect of conditioning stimuli on the pursuit initiation was larger when the duration of the conditioning period was longer. The effect of conditioning stimuli decayed as the duration of the blank period became longer. The findings from the present study are consistent with the properties of neurons in the middle temporal area of monkeys.