Instrumentation to stimulate gap saccades, pro-saccades, and overlap saccades

Although a great amount of research studying oculomotor function has been conducted, a full understanding of how it relates to and is affected by neurological and neurodegenerative disorders is still warranted. This experiment seeks to build a system comparing pro-saccades, gap saccades, and overlap saccadic eye movements. Gap saccades extinguish the visual targets for 200 msec while overlap saccades presents two visual targets simultaneously for 200 msec. This preliminary study used various analysis methods to determine changes in latency and the number of saccades generated through the experiment, which may reflect visual fatigue while studying binocularly normal subjects. Results showed consistent subject latency in horizontal movements, while vertical movements exhibited more variance compared to horizontal movements. Although the number of saccades initiated exhibited an upward trend as the experiment progressed, the Pearson correlation coefficient was low (r²=0.32). This study has developed instrumentation and analyses measurements to study pro-saccades, gap saccades, and overlap saccades movements. This tool will be used for future experiments to study those with neurological and neurodegenerative disorders.