Abstract

Humans execute saccadic eye movements to shift their gaze to objects of interest. The plasticity of these saccades is often studied with the double-step paradigm, in which the saccade target is relocated during the eye movement to induce an error afterwards. The oculomotor system adapts to that error by adjusting the programming of subsequent saccades towards the final location of the saccade target. This double-step paradigm led to the traditional view that saccade adaptation corrects for low-level errors that occur immediately after the saccade to continuously maintain saccade accuracy over the lifespan. By presenting synchronously or asynchronously competing targets after saccades and by manipulating their relevance for perceptual tasks, we were able to show that high-level factors can have a profound influence on the target selection of saccades and the determination of errors after saccades. This indicates that saccade adaptation not just reacts to low-level errors but also considers high-level factors and therefore can serve the more general goal of optimizing eye movements to the current context.