TY - JOUR T1 - Aging effects and test-retest reliability of inhibitory control for saccadic eye movements JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0459-19.2020 SP - ENEURO.0459-19.2020 AU - Martyna Beata Płomecka AU - Zofia Barańczuk-Turska AU - Christian Pfeiffer AU - Nicolas Langer Y1 - 2020/09/09 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/early/2020/09/04/ENEURO.0459-19.2020.abstract N2 - Neuropsychological studies indicate that healthy aging is associated with a decline of inhibitory control of attentional and behavioral systems. A widely accepted measure of inhibitory control is the antisaccade task that requires both the inhibition of a reflexive saccadic response towards a visual target and the initiation of a voluntary eye movement in the opposite direction. To better understand the nature of age-related differences in inhibitory control, we evaluated antisaccade task performance in 78 younger (20-35 years) and 78 older (60-80 years) participants. In order to provide reliable estimates of inhibitory control for individual subjects, we investigated test-retest reliability of the reaction time, error rate, saccadic gain and peak saccadic velocity and further estimated latent, not directly observable processed contributing to changes in the antisaccade task execution. The Intraclass Correlation Coefficients for an older group of participants emerged as good to excellent for most of our antisaccade task measures. Furthermore, using Bayesian multivariate models, we inspected age-related differences in the performances of healthy younger and older participants. The older group demonstrated higher error rates, longer reaction times, significantly more inhibition failures, and late prosaccades as compared to young adults. The consequently lower ability of older adults to voluntarily inhibit saccadic responses has been interpreted as an indicator of age-related inhibitory control decline. Additionally, we performed a Bayesian model comparison of used computational models and concluded that the SERIA model explains our data better than PROSA that does not incorporate a late decision process.Significance Statement The antisaccade task, widely used in the study of inhibitory control, offers a window onto the operation of executive functioning. This study established that the measures proposed by the internationally standardized antisaccades protocol are reliable over time and therefore constitute meaningful and suitable estimates for future longitudinal studies and identifying promising biomarkers for cognitive decline. Furthermore, older subjects exhibited longer saccadic reaction times and significantly higher average error rates. We further decomposed the task with computational models. We expanded previous findings by showing that aging differences in reaction time and error rate can be explained by fast or slow inhibition and the probability of generating late voluntary prosaccades. ER -