A comparison of post-saccadic oscillations in European-Born and China-Born British University Undergraduates

Abstract

Previous research has revealed that people from different genetic, racial, biological, and/or cultural backgrounds may display fundamental differences in eye-tracking behavior. These differences may have a cognitive origin or they may be at a lower level within the neurophysiology of the oculomotor network, or they may be related to environment factors. In this paper we investigated one of the physiological aspects of eye movements known as post-saccadic oscillations and we show that this type of eye movement is very different between two different populations. We compared the post-saccadic oscillations recorded by a video-based eye tracker between two groups of participants: European-born and Chinese-born British students. We recorded eye movements from a group of 42 Caucasians defined as White British or White Europeans and 52 Chinese-born participants all with ages ranging from 18 to 36 during a prosaccade task. The post-saccadic oscillations were extracted from the gaze data which was compared between the two groups in terms of their first overshoot and undershoot. The results revealed that the shape of the post-saccadic oscillations varied significantly between the two groups which may indicate a difference in a multitude of genetic, cultural, physiologic, anatomical or environmental factors. We further show that the differences in the post-saccadic oscillations could influence the oculomotor characteristics such as saccade duration. We conclude that genetic, racial, biological, and/or cultural differences can affect the morphology of the eye movement data recorded and should be considered when studying eye movements and oculomotor fixation and saccadic behaviors.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0229177
Funding Information: The work described in this paper is funded by EPSRC project EP/M006255/1 Monitoring Of Dementia using Eye Movements (MODEM). Thank you to Moya Wang for her help with data collection.
Additional Information: © 2020 Mardanbegi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Uncontrolled Keywords: Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all),Agricultural and Biological Sciences(all),General
Publication ISSN: 1932-6203
Last Modified: 26 Feb 2024 08:36
Date Deposited: 11 Mar 2020 15:09
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
https://journal ... al.pone.0229177 (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2020-02-25
Accepted Date: 2020-02-02
Authors: Mardanbegi, Diako
Wilcockson, Thomas D.W.
Killick, Rebecca
Xia, Baiqiang
Gellersen, Hans
Sawyer, Peter (ORCID Profile 0000-0001-8044-2738)
Crawford, Trevor J.

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