Eyeball translations affect saccadic eye movements beyond brainstem control
Johannes Kirchner, Tamara Watson, Jochen Bauer, Markus Lappe · Journal of Neurophysiology · 2023
We found that saccades during blinks can massively overshoot their target when the eyeball is retracted. Our data imply that the overshoots are not part of the saccade plan prepared in the brainstem, but instead a consequence of the altered biomechanics resulting from concurrent eyeball translation and rotation. To our best knowledge, this is the first direct observation of dynamic properties of the oculomotor plant altering the execution of rotational eye movements.