View article

It is well known that under specific conditions, saccades can be made with extremely short latencies (about 110 to 130 ms). These so-called Express Saccades (ES) have been observed in animals showing two separate peaks in the saccade latencies distributions. Up till now, separate peaks in the distribution have not been observed in human observers. In two experiments we investigated the saccade latency distribution while examining two well-known target-distractor interactions. We examined the Global Effect (GE) which occurs when a distractor is presented in close proximity of the target. Typically, saccades tend to land at a location between target and distractor. In addition we examined the Remote Distractor Effect (RDE), an effect which describes the longer saccade latencies when a distractor is presented further away from a target. In both experiments participants made saccades to a sudden onset target …