Change in saccadic reaction time due to the presentation of the cue of target information

The time course of the process preparing for saccade eye movement was investigated in a psychophysical experiment involving a delayed saccade task. The presentation of the saccade response signal was delayed with respect to the presentation of a cue that informed the subject of metrics of the upcoming saccade. The cue appeared probabilistically at one of two potential locations. The saccadic reaction times (SRTs) decreased with longer delays of the saccade response signal. This indicates that the preparatory process of the saccade progresses according to the information about the metrics of the saccade during the delay. Additionally, the difference in saccade reaction times for different probabilities of the cue presentation disappeared with a delay longer than 192 ms. This suggests that the effect of the prediction according to the probability decreases as the preparatory process evoked by the cue progresses. We examined whether the data could be explained with a linear model.