Antisakkaden

Antisakkaden, in Norwegian often used for antisaccades, refer to eye movements in which a person looks away from a suddenly appearing visual stimulus rather than toward it. They are typically studied with the antisaccade task, where a fixation point is replaced by a peripheral cue and participants are instructed to look in the opposite direction as quickly as possible. The task assesses the ability to inhibit a reflexive prosaccade and to generate a voluntary saccade to the mirror location.

The neural basis of antisakkaden involves a network that supports inhibitory control and voluntary eye movements. Reflexive prosaccades engage the superior colliculus and brainstem circuitry, while antisaccades recruit frontal circuits, including the frontal eye fields and supplementary eye fields in the prefrontal cortex, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and parietal areas, with modulation by basal ganglia circuits. This network supports the suppression of reflexive impulses and the initiation of a saccade in the opposite direction.

Measures commonly reported in antisakkaden research include error rate (proportion of trials where the eye moves toward the cue) and latency (time to initiate the antisaccade). Compared with reflexive pro­saccades, antisaccades are typically slower and more error-prone, reflecting the cognitive load of inhibition and voluntary vector inversion. Factors such as development, aging, fatigue, and clinical conditions influence performance.

Clinical and research relevance: antisakkaden performance serves as a marker of executive function and prefrontal control. Abnormalities—increased error rates and longer latencies—have been observed in schizophrenia and other psychiatric or neurological conditions and are used to study cognitive pharmacology and the neural basis of voluntary gaze control.