antisaccade

Antisaccade is a laboratory task used to study voluntary oculomotor control and inhibitory processes. In the standard antisaccade paradigm, a target appears suddenly in the periphery while the participant fixates. The instruction is to suppress the reflexive glance toward the target and instead saccade to the mirrored location on the opposite side. A correct response is an antisaccade to the opposite hemifield; a reflexive movement toward the target is counted as a prosaccade error. Common performance measures include error rate, correct antisaccade latency, and antisaccade gain.

Neural basis: antisaccade performance requires inhibition of the reflexive saccade generated by the superior colliculus and the generation of a voluntary saccade by cortical oculomotor circuits. Frontoparietal networks, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, frontal eye fields, supplementary eye fields, and posterior parietal cortex, modulate activity in the superior colliculus and basal ganglia to implement the rule-based response. The anterior cingulate and other control systems monitor errors and guide adjustments.

Clinical and developmental relevance: the antisaccade task is widely used to assess inhibitory control in health and disease. Elevated antisaccade error rates and longer antisaccade latencies are reported in schizophrenia; similar paradigms reveal variable deficits in ADHD and autism. Developmentally, antisaccade performance improves through childhood and adolescence, approaching adult-like levels in late childhood or adolescence. Variants include memory-guided antisaccades, gap and overlap paradigms, and different target timings; data are collected with behavioral, EEG/ERP, or fMRI measures to study cognitive control and its neural correlates.