Smooth pursuit inhibition reveals audiovisual enhancement of fast movement control

Abstract

The sudden onset of a visual object or event elicits an inhibition of eye movements at latencies approaching the minimum delay of visuomotor conductance in the brain. Typically, information presented via multiple sensory modalities, such as sound and vision, evokes stronger and more robust responses than unisensory information. Whether and how multisensory information affects ultra-short latency oculomotor inhibition is unknown. In two experiments, we investigate smooth pursuit and saccadic inhibition in response to multisensory distractors. Observers tracked a horizontally moving dot and were interrupted by an unpredictable visual, auditory, or audiovisual distractor. Distractors elicited a transient inhibition of pursuit eye velocity and catch-up saccade rate within ∼100 ms of their onset. Audiovisual distractors evoked stronger oculomotor inhibition than visual- or auditory-only distractors, indicating multisensory response enhancement. Multisensory response enhancement magnitudes were equal to the linear sum of responses to component stimuli. These results demonstrate that multisensory information affects eye movements even at ultra-short latencies, establishing a lower time boundary for multisensory-guided behavior. We conclude that oculomotor circuits must have privileged access to sensory information from multiple modalities, presumably via a fast, subcortical pathway.