What question did this study set out to answer?

The study investigates how visual and auditory stimuli influence microsaccadic eye movements and their underlying neural pathways.

February 27, 2026

Vision dominates sound in mediating classic cue-induced microsaccadic eye movement modulationsin rhesus macaque monkeys

Puntos clave

The study investigates how visual and auditory stimuli influence microsaccadic eye movements and their underlying neural pathways.
Devised behavioral paradigms to manipulate temporal and spatial aspects of saccadic inhibition.
Monkeys maintained gaze fixation during experiments to assess microsaccadic responses to visual and auditory stimuli.
Used spatially-nonlateralized and spatially-lateralized sound pulses to explore their effects on microsaccades.
Sound pulses alone had minimal impact on microsaccade rates.
When combined with visual stimuli, sound accelerated microsaccadic inhibition timing by ~14-18 ms.
Spatially-nonlateralized sounds interfered with microsaccade direction modulations, while lateralized sounds had a weaker effect.

Resumen

Visual onsets in the environment cause a short-latency reduction in saccade generation likelihood. Concomitant with that, the metrics of the saccades that do happen near the time of saccadic inhibition reflect the landscape of stimulus-driven neural responses in topographically organized brain maps. While certain aspects of saccadic inhibition have already been explored from a neurophysiological perspective, several questions remain, including which sensory-motor pathways propagate visual input information to the final oculomotor control circuitry with such short latencies. Here, motivated by evidence of a dissociation between temporal and spatial aspects of saccadic inhibition, we devised behavioral paradigms experimentally manipulating either aspect. Rhesus macaque monkeys maintained gaze fixation, and we characterized visually-driven microsaccadic inhibition with and without paired auditory pulses. In one condition, the sound pulses were spatially-nonlateralized, thus only affecting the temporal processes associated with microsaccadic inhibition; in another, the pulses were spatially-lateralized, affecting both the temporal and spatial components. We found that sound pulses alone barely affected microsaccade rates. However, when paired with visual stimuli, they accelerated the timing of visually-driven microsaccadic inhibition by ~14-18 ms. In terms of microsaccade directions, spatially-nonlateralized sounds interfered with, but did not eliminate, visually-driven direction modulations. Surprisingly, lateralized sounds had a much weaker effect on microsaccade direction modulations, even when the sound source was in the opposite hemifield as the appearing visual stimulus. We conclude that vision dominates sound in mediating classic microsaccadic inhibition, and we argue that our paradigms are ideal for neurophysiological investigations of the parallel sensory-motor pathways contributing to such inhibition.

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