Asymmetrical adaptation of human saccades to anisometropic spectacles

Saccades are the rapid eye movements which enable us to voluntarily shift our gaze from one visual target to another. They serve to bring newly selected visual targets to the fovea of each of the two eyes, which is a small part of the retina with high visual acuity. This accurate, binocular control of saccades requires a high quality of oculomotor coordination. During the course of a lifetime, the various structures involved in the generation and the control of saccades may be subject to change, due to, for example, growth, ageing, disease or injury. These changes will undoubtedly affect saccadic control, and, consequently, jeopardize its quality. To safeguard its proper functioning, the oculomotor system will therefore have to adapt adequately to such changes. As these changes probably take place haphazardly, at different places, with different time-courses and with different degrees of severity, the saccadic subsystem should be capable of adapting specifically to such non-uniform changes. Adaptation of saccades has been described in the literature subsequent to local, physical damage to external eye muscles, as well as to purely visual stimuli (for a review, see Chapter 2). The aim of this thesis was to assess both qualitatively and quantitatively how the sa~cadic subsystem responds to a consistent visual pressure for an asymmetrical adaptation, i.e., adaptation that is different for each of the two eyes