Saccade adaptation goes for the goal

The oculomotor system maintains saccade accuracy by adjusting saccades that are consistently inaccurate. Four experiments were performed to determine the relative contribution of background and target postsaccadic displacement. Unlike typical saccade adaptation experiments, we used natural image scenes and masked target and background displacements during the saccade to exclude motion signals from allowing detection of the displacements. We found that the background had no effect on saccade gain while the target drove gain changes. Only when the target was blanked after the saccade did we observe some adaptation in the direction of the background displacement. We conclude that target selection is critical to saccade adaptation, and operates effectively against natural image backgrounds.