Developmental changes in the control of saccadic eye movements in response to directional eye gaze and arrows.

We investigated developmental differences in oculomotor control between 10-year-old children and adults using a central interference task. In this task, the colour of a fixation point instructed participants to saccade either to the left or to the right. These saccade directions were either congruent or incongruent with two types of distractor cue: either the direction of eye gaze of a centrally presented schematic face, or the direction of arrows. Children had greater difficulties inhibiting the distractor cues than did adults, which revealed itself in longer saccade latencies for saccades that were incongruent with the distractor cues as well as more errors on these incongruent trials than on congruent trials. Counter to our prediction, in terms of saccade latencies, both children and adults had greater difficulties inhibiting the arrow than the eye gaze distractors.