THE ANTISACCADE - A REVIEW OF BASIC RESEARCH AND CLINICAL-STUDIES

The ability to suppress reflexive responses in favor of voluntary moto r acts is crucial for everyday life. Both abilities can be tested with an oculomotor task, the antisaccade task. This task requires subjects to suppress a reflexive prosaccade to a flashed visual stimulus and i nstead to generate a voluntary saccade to the opposite side. This arti cle reviews what is currently known about the neural structures and pr ocesses which are involved in the performance of this task. Current da ta show that a variety of brain lesions, neurological diseases and psy chiatric disorders result in errors, i.e. prosaccades towards the stim ulus, in this task. Brain imaging studies have shown that a widely dis tributed cortical and subcortical network is active during the generat ion of antisaccades. These findings are discussed and the potential of the antisaccade task for diagnostic purposes is evaluated. (C) 1998 E lsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.