Timing and kinematics of horizontal within-blink saccades measured by EOG

Eyeblinks are the brief closures of the lid. They are accompanied by a cocontraction of the eye muscles that temporarily pulls the whole eyeball back into its socket. When blinks occur together with execution of saccadic gaze shifts, they interfere with the saccadic premotor circuit, causing these within-blink saccades to be slower than normal and also time-locked to blinks. To analyze the trajectory of within-blink saccades, subtraction of the entangled blink-related eye movement is required. Here we propose a combination of principal component analysis (PCA) and a regression model to subtract the blink-related component of the eye movement based on the respective blink metrics. We used electrooculography (EOG) to measure eye and lid movements of 12 participants who performed saccades with and without blinks. We found that within-blink saccades are slower than without-blink saccades and are tightly coupled in time to blink onset. Surprisingly, in some participants we observed large dynamic overshoots of up to 15 degrees for saccades of only 5 degrees amplitude. The finding of dynamic overshoots was independently confirmed by dynamic MRI for two of the participants and challenges the current view that within-blink saccades are programmed as slow, but straight, saccades. We hypothesize that the dynamic overshoots could be attributed to inhibition of omnipause neurons during blinks, the simultaneous cocontraction of extraocular muscles, or a combination of both. NEW & NOTEWORTHY This study observed that people make large dynamic overshoots when making a saccadic eye movement within a blink but their eyes are back on target by the time the eyelids are open. We used electrooculography (EOG) to measure eye movements even when the lid is down and introduced a novel procedure to subtract blink-related EOG components. These findings challenge the current view that within-blink saccades are programmed as slow but straight saccades.