Oculomotor target selection often requires discriminating visual features, but it remains unclear how oculomotor substrates encoding saccade vectors functionally contribute to this process. One possibility is that oculomotor vector representations (observed directly as physiological activation or inferred from behavioral interference) of potential targets are continuously re-weighted by task-relevance computed elsewhere in specialized visual modules, while an alternative possibility is that oculomotor modules utilize local featural analyses to actively discriminate potential targets. Strengthening the former account, oculomotor vector representations have longer onset latencies for ventral- (i.e., color) than dorsal-stream features (i.e., luminance), suggesting that oculomotor vector representations originate from featurally-relevant specialized visual modules. Here, we extended this reasoning by behaviorally examining whether the onset latency of saccadic interference elicited by visually complex stimuli is greater than is commonly observed for simple stimuli. We measured human saccade metrics (saccade curvature, endpoint deviations, saccade frequency, error proportion) as a function of time after abrupt distractor onset. Distractors were novel, visually complex, and had to be discriminated from targets to guide saccades. The earliest saccadic interference latency was ~110 ms, considerably longer than previous experiments, suggesting that sensory representations projected into the oculomotor system are gated to allow for sufficient featural processing to satisfy task demands. Surprisingly, initial oculomotor vector representations encoded features, as we manipulated the visual similarity between targets and distractors and observed increased vector modulation response magnitude and duration when the distractor was highly similar to the target. Oculomotor vector modulation was gradually extinguished over the time course of the experiment.

中文翻译：

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动眼神经目标选择由复杂对象介导

动眼神经目标选择通常需要区分视觉特征，但尚不清楚编码眼跳向量的动眼神经基质如何在功能上促成这一过程。一种可能性是潜在目标的动眼神经向量表示（直接观察为生理激活或从行为干扰推断）通过在专门的视觉模块中其他地方计算的任务相关性不断重新加权，而另一种可能性是动眼神经模块利用局部特征分析积极区分潜在目标。加强前一种解释，动眼神经向量表示的腹侧（即颜色）比背侧流特征（即亮度）具有更长的起始潜伏期，表明动眼神经向量表示源自与特征相关的专业视觉模块。在这里，我们通过行为检查视觉复杂刺激引起的眼跳干扰的开始潜伏期是否大于简单刺激通常观察到的延迟来扩展这一推理。我们测量了人类眼跳指标（眼跳曲率、端点偏差、眼跳频率、错误比例）作为突然干扰物发作后时间的函数。干扰器是新颖的、视觉复杂的，并且必须与目标区分开来引导眼跳。最早的眼跳干扰潜伏期约为 110 毫秒，比以前的实验长得多，这表明投射到动眼神经系统的感觉表征被门控以允许足够的特征处理来满足任务需求。出奇，初始动眼神经向量表示编码特征，因为我们操纵了目标和干扰物之间的视觉相似性，并观察到当干扰物与目标高度相似时，向量调制响应幅度和持续时间增加。随着实验的进行，动眼神经矢量调制逐渐消失。