Ineffective cues for contextual saccade adaptation

Contextual saccadic adaptation is investigated through a variant of the double-step paradigm, where two directions of intrasaccadic steps are signaled by two cues. This enables the simultaneous induction of two distinct saccadic adaptations. Surprisingly, contextual adaptation is effective only with motor-related cues, whereas visual cues such as target color and shape do not elicit significant adaptation. We tested nine different contextual cues to signal intrasaccadic steps in a contextual double-step paradigm: visual stimulus duration, lateralization of a sound, various statistical regularities across trials, symbolic cues, starting location of the target, and the amplitude of the first step or the target color and shape. Robust systematic contextual learning was found under the amplitude and the starting location experiments, whereas no learning occurred with any other cues. This lack of contextual learning further confirms that the prediction of the intrasaccadic steps depends on the nature of the context. In two additional experiments replicating those using target color and shape, and symbolic cues, participants were periodically prompted to explicitly report the contextual cue they had just experienced. Again, no systematic contextual adaptation was observed despite participants achieving reporting the contextual cue accurately. This dissociation between perceptual reports and motor tasks involving the same visual information aligns with previous results on the constraints for contextual learning. The saccadic system, evolutionarily specialized for spatial targeting, exhibits selective learning that prioritizes localization cues, effectively ignoring nonmotor cues in its learning processes, even when such cues are explicitly perceived.NEW & NOTEWORTHY This study demonstrates that motor-related cues drive contextual saccadic adaptation, whereas purely perceptual cues fail to do so. We observed a dissociation between the ability to report nonmotor cues and their failure to induce contextual adaptation. The results underscore the importance of spatially relevant cues for guiding contextual saccadic adaptation. These findings deepen our understanding of the selective mechanisms underlying motor learning.