Neural control in vergence eye movements

Vergence eye movements are the inward and outward turning of the eyes and contemporary views believe these movements are mediated by a preprogramming and feedback controlled mechanism. The individual left and right eye responses have been reported to have large dynamic asymmetries between the individual eye movements. One hypothesis to explain the observed asymmetry is the preprogrammed transient component is monocularly controlled. A visual stimulus was created to stimulate a single step change to one eye and a double step change to the other eye using a haploscope. Results show that in some responses a double high-velocity component was observed in one response with a single high-velocity response in the other eye. This behavior suggests the preprogrammed component within a vergence response may be monocularly controlled.