The gain of saccades (i.e., rapid eye movements) can be modified in response to the changing properties of the oculomotor system to maintain ideal saccadic accuracy through sensorimotor adaptive mechanisms, a process known as saccadic adaptation. Our lab is investigating the adaptive control of eye movements in patients with amblyopia using double-step saccadic adaptation paradigms.
Our experimental apparatus allows accurate target presentation using a high bandwidth laser beam galvanometer that is capable of target stimulus stepping based on real-time eye velocity signals from our infrared video-based eye tracker. This setup enables us to perturb our visual stimuli during the eye movements (intra-saccadically) to artificially introduce positional errors, and subsequently monitor the movement made in response to this perturbation.