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The inhibition of automatic saccades in early infancy
1Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
Insights
Four-month-old infants can learn to inhibit automatic eye movements (saccades). This suggests that the frontal eye fields, crucial for voluntary control, mature early in infancy.
Area of Science:
- Developmental neuroscience
- Cognitive neuroscience
- Ophthalmology
Background:
- Adults with frontal eye field damage struggle with voluntary eye movements and suppressing automatic saccades.
- Infant saccades are predominantly automatic, driven by external stimuli early in life.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the development of inhibitory control over automatic saccades in 4-month-old infants.
- To determine if infants can learn to suppress automatic eye movements in anticipation of a target.
Main Methods:
- Infants were presented with peripheral cue stimuli predicting a target's location.
- Experiment 1 assessed inhibitory saccade control with a predictive cue-target relationship.
- Experiment 2 used a non-predictive cue to control for stimulus habituation.
Main Results:
- Four-month-old infants demonstrated the ability to inhibit automatic saccades to a peripheral cue.
- The observed inhibition was specific to the predictive cue condition, not general habituation.
Conclusions:
- Infants develop the capacity to inhibit automatic saccades by 4 months of age.
- This finding implies significant maturation of the frontal eye fields during early infancy.
Abstract:
Adult patients with damage centered around the frontal eye fields are severely impaired in the ability to suppress unwanted automatic saccades and in the ability to make volitional eye movements. Over the first few weeks of life most saccades generated by infants appear to be automatic, and are triggered in response to exogenous factors. In the first experiment, the ability of 4-month-old infants to inhibit automatic saccades was studied by exposing them to a series of trials in which a peripheral cue stimulus predicted the location (opposite) in which a colorful, dynamic target stimulus appeared. The results indicate that 4-month-old infants are able to learn to inhibit automatic saccades to a peripheral stimulus, implying maturation of the frontal eye fields by this age. The results of Experiment 2, in which there was no contingent relationship between the cue and target, indicated that the decline in orienting to the cue observed in the first experiment was not due to differential habituation to the less-complex stimulus.
