Carlos, Sven, and Martin just had a new paper accepted in the Journal of Neurophysiology. As the title suggests, we show saccadic adaptation to a systematically varying disturbance. We are particularly happy about this work as it establishes a new paradigm to study plasticity in the saccadic system that—as we argue at length in the paper—allows us to disentangle learning processes that have been confounded in classical studies of saccadic adaptation.

Here’s the New & Noteworthy section of the paper:

Saccadic adaptation maintains the mapping between rapid eye movements and their visual targets. We studied the dynamics of this process using an intra-saccadic target displacement that changed in size as a sinusoidal function of the trial number. The oculomotor response displayed two independent components—a delayed periodic change in saccade gain superimposed on a drift towards higher hypometria (despite the displacements’ zero mean). We quantitatified this response and discuss possible origins and underlying learning processes.

Classical fixed-step adaptation protocols (a,b) and sinusoidal saccadic adaptation (c).

You find a preprint of the paper in our list of publications.