Blink effects on ongoing smooth pursuit eye movements in humans

Blinks are known to affect eye movements, e.g., saccades, slow and fast vergence, and saccade-vergence interaction, in two ways by: superimposition of blink-associated eye movements and changes of the central premotor activity in the brainstem. The goal of this study was to determine, for the first time, the effects of trigeminal-evoked blinks on ongoing smooth pursuit eye movements which could be related to visual sensory or premotor neuronal changes. This was compared to the effect of a target disappearing for 100 to 300 ms duration during ongoing smooth pursuit (blank paradigm), in order to control for the vi…