Unaffected smooth pursuit but impaired motion perception in monocularly enucleated observers

•Losing an eye during childhood adversely affects motion perception.•Closed-loop smooth pursuit is unaffected by early enucleation.•There is a dissociation between the awareness of motion and smooth pursuit.

The objective of this paper was to study the characteristics of closed-loop smooth pursuit eye movements of 15 unilaterally eye enucleated individuals and 18 age-matched controls and to compare them to their performance in two tests of motion perception: relative motion and motion coherence. The relative motion test used a brief (150 ms) small stimulus with a continuously present fixation target to preclude pursuit eye movements. The duration of the motion coherence trials was 1 s, which allowed a brief pursuit of the stimuli. Smooth pursuit data were obtained with a step-ramp procedure. Controls were tested both monocularly and binocularly. The data showed worse performance by the enucleated observers in the relative motion task but no statistically significant differences in motion coherence between the two groups. On the other hand, the smooth pursuit gain of the enucleated participants was as good as that of controls for whom we found no binocular advantage. The data show that enucleated observers do not exhibit deficits in the afferent or sensory pathways or in the efferent or motor pathways of the steady-state smooth pursuit system even though their visual processing of motion is impaired.

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