Training the Brain With Antisaccades for Focus

An antisaccade is a simple instruction with a demanding job behind it. When something appears at the edge of your vision, you look the other way instead of toward it. The antisaccade task asks whether the brain can hold back that automatic glance and make a deliberate one in its place. I am Dr. Alireza Chizari, DC, DACNB, a Board-Certified Functional Neurologist at California Brain & Spine Center in Calabasas. This article explains what antisaccades show, how the test is done, and what research on training them does and does not support.

You may be here because someone suggested eye-movement exercises to you. You may also have read that your eyes can reveal how your brain is working. Both ideas have something real in them. Antisaccades are a well-studied measure of attention control, which is the ability to stay on task when something else pulls at you. The evidence that practising them changes symptoms in any condition is thin, and I point out where it stops as we go.

Many of the people who ask me about antisaccades are recovering from a head injury and want to know whether their eyes are part of the picture. If that is your situation, the page on concussion care in Calabasas describes how the full evaluation works. This article stays with the eye movement itself. Once you understand it, the rest of that evaluation is easier to follow.

What Are Antisaccades, and What Do They Show About the Brain?

An antisaccade is an eye movement made deliberately to the mirror-opposite side of a target that has just appeared. A review by Jamadar, Fielding and Egan that pooled brain-imaging studies of the task describes it as one that "requires participants to inhibit a reflexive saccade and instead make a volitional saccade". The task depends on that two-step demand: first you stop the automatic movement, then you make the chosen one.

A saccade is the quick jump your eyes make from one point to the next. It is what your eyes do as you read from word to word, or when they turn toward movement at the edge of your vision. The ordinary saccade toward a target is often called a prosaccade, so that it can be told apart from the antisaccade, which goes the other way.

What Happens in a Single Antisaccade Trial

A single antisaccade trial starts with your eyes on a point in the center of a screen. A dot or shape appears to one side. You do not look at it. You look the same distance to the opposite side. The screen then resets and the next trial begins.

Researchers who study the task treat holding back the automatic glance toward the target as critical to a correct antisaccade. Each trial asks whether the brain stopped that reflex before it took over.

Why Holding Back the First Glance Matters

Holding back the first glance is the part of an antisaccade that tells researchers the most. Cognitive scientists use the antisaccade task as a classic measure of attention control. The Engle Lab at Georgia Tech, which uses the task to study attention, defines that ability as "the domain-general ability to regulate information processing in service of goal-directed behavior." In everyday terms, it means you keep doing what you set out to do while something else competes for your attention.

That is why I find antisaccades useful when I explain a feeling people often describe to me: the sense that the brain reacts before they can stop it. When reading, screens or a busy store feel harder than they should, attention control may be one of the systems worth examining. The antisaccade is one structured way to examine it. Other ways exist, and it is never the whole answer.

How Does the Brain Control an Antisaccade?

The brain controls an antisaccade through a network of regions, and a review by Jamadar and colleagues describes two of them with the clearest jobs. One supervises the response, and the other connects the decision to the machinery that moves the eyes.

The Prefrontal Cortex Keeps the Instruction

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is an area toward the front and side of the brain. In current models it is considered to take a supervisory role during an antisaccade, "biasing other oculomotor areas" (oculomotor means eye-movement) toward the deliberate response. Put plainly, it helps keep the instruction (look away) in charge while the rest of the eye-movement system is drawn to the target.

This supervisory role is why antisaccades are discussed as a frontal task. The movement itself is small and quick. The decision behind it involves the regions that set goals and hold them steady against a competing pull.

The Frontal Eye Field and the Superior Colliculus

The frontal eye field is a region of the frontal lobe that is directly involved in controlling eye movements, through its connections with the superior colliculus. The superior colliculus is a structure in the midbrain. An antisaccade therefore links a goal held in the frontal lobe to a midbrain structure involved in where the eyes go next.

I trained as an electrical engineer before I trained in functional neurology, and I still picture this as a control system with a fast default and a slower override. The default is the reflexive glance toward whatever just appeared. The override is the frontal network biasing the system toward the opposite direction. An antisaccade test measures how quickly and how reliably that override wins, trial after trial.

Antisaccade vs Saccade: What Is the Difference?

The difference between an antisaccade and a saccade is direction and control: a prosaccade follows the brain's automatic pull toward a target, while an antisaccade has to override it.

This is also why people looking up a saccade test and people looking up an antisaccade test often arrive at the same idea. Both record fast eye movements. Only the antisaccade adds the step of holding back, and that added step is what the comparison below sets out.

Neither column is a diagnosis by itself. The antisaccade adds a demand on the frontal network that supervises the response, and that added step is why researchers use it to measure attention control.

Are Antisaccades Different After a Concussion?

Antisaccades may be slower after a concussion, according to one small exploratory study, but the evidence is early, and the study's own authors describe their findings as preliminary.

In that study, by Ting and colleagues, people with acute mild traumatic brain injury or concussion showed "significant deficits in antisaccade median latency" compared with controls. In plain terms, they took longer to start the deliberate look away. Within the same group, slower antisaccades went along with poorer performance on an executive-function task (a test of the planning and self-control skills that guide behavior) and with a greater symptom burden.

The authors concluded that the antisaccade task "could be useful as a neurological marker for mTBI and concussion", and in the same passage said that more work is required. The second half of that sentence matters. A marker that has been tested in one small group gives researchers something to study further. It is not yet a test anyone should rely on to say that a concussion has happened, or that it has healed.

For someone recovering from a head injury, an antisaccade result is read as one observation inside a wider evaluation. Symptoms, history, balance, vision and the rest of the eye-movement examination are read together with it, and a slow result on its own does not settle anything.

Eye-movement testing also has no place in an emergency. Some symptoms after a blow to the head need emergency care right away, and the article on post-concussion red flags goes through them in more detail. The box below lists the signs the CDC names.

What Happens During an Anti Saccade Test?

An anti saccade test records your eye movements while you look away from targets that appear on a screen, and research on the task reports two measures: how quickly you start the deliberate look, and how often your eyes move in the wrong direction.

The Two Numbers an Antisaccade Test Records

The first number is latency, the time between the target appearing and your eyes starting to move. Latency was the measure that differed in the concussion study described above. The second is the directional error rate, the measure the training study below reported alongside speed. A look toward the target is the reflex the task asks you to hold back.

The two numbers can move independently of each other. In a study of antisaccade training in healthy adults, people became faster at the task with no change in their direction errors. For that reason the two are always read together, and a change in one is not assumed to mean a change in the other.

Where Eye-Movement Testing Sits in the First Visit

At California Brain & Spine Center, eye-movement testing is part of a broader neurological examination, not a stand-alone screen. When it is relevant to your symptoms, it sits inside the 120-minute neurodiagnostic assessment, together with balance testing, vestibular checks and a detailed history. The findings are explained before any plan is discussed.

"Then we did the full examinations like eye tracking and balance test and he explained my results and what they mean for my symptoms."

From a Google review

Results are explained in plain language: what each test looked at, what it found, and what it did not find. A printout of numbers with no explanation is of little use to anyone, so the time to go through them is built into the visit.

Why One Antisaccade Result Is Not a Diagnosis

One antisaccade result is not a diagnosis. The task measures a general ability, attention control, and the researchers who studied it in concussion say more work is needed before it can be relied on as a marker. A number from a single test session therefore cannot name a cause.

A slow or error-prone result is treated as a finding that needs explaining. It is compared with the rest of the examination and with your symptoms before it means anything for your care, and sometimes the most useful conclusion is that it does not change the picture at all.

Patients come to the clinic in Calabasas from across the West Valley and the 101 corridor, including neighboring Agoura Hills. If an eye-movement assessment has been suggested to you and you live nearby, the process is the same whether this is a first evaluation or a second opinion after earlier tests.

Can You Train the Brain With Antisaccades?

Training the brain with antisaccades has been linked to faster performance on the task in healthy adults, but none of the research in this article shows that it treats concussion, brain fog or any other condition.

One question patients often ask me is whether eye-movement exercises can really improve focus and control. It is a fair question, and the most direct evidence comes from a study by Jamadar and colleagues. Neurologically healthy adults who practised antisaccades for two weeks "performed antisaccade trials faster with no change in directional error rate". The extra speed came at a cost in spatial accuracy, so their eyes landed a little less precisely than before.

The same study found increased activity on fMRI, a brain scan that tracks changes in blood flow linked to brain activity, after training. The authors read that as evidence that the eye-movement control network can adapt. Adaptation of this kind is what the word neuroplasticity describes: the brain changing with experience and practice.

The study also has clear limits. Its participants were healthy, so it says nothing about people living with symptoms. It measured performance on the eye-movement task itself, not reading, driving or concentration at work. And getting faster is not automatically an improvement when accuracy slips at the same time.

So when I use eye-movement work with a patient, I describe it as practice of one specific skill inside a broader plan. I never present it as brain training that carries over to everything else. A plan may include vestibular rehabilitation for dizziness, cognitive rehabilitation or eye-movement exercises, when clinically appropriate after evaluation. It changes as your symptoms and test results change.

What People Often Misunderstand About Eye Exercises

Another question I hear is whether antisaccade drills from a video or an app are the same as eye-movement work in the clinic. The difference is practical. A drill is only useful if it matches what your examination found, so I would rather see how your eyes and balance respond before suggesting anything to practise at home.

People also misread the result itself. A slower antisaccade does not mean you are not trying, and it does not mean something is permanently wrong. It means that on that day, one measured part of attention control took longer than expected. The next step is to understand why, alongside everything else the examination shows.

Common Questions About Antisaccades

These are the antisaccade questions that come up most often, each answered in a few sentences.

Where Does Antisaccade Testing Fit in Your Care?

Antisaccade testing fits in as one observation inside a full evaluation: it shows how well the brain holds back a reflexive glance, and it is read alongside your symptoms and the rest of your examination.

I am Dr. Alireza Chizari, DC, DACNB, and at California Brain & Spine Center in Calabasas I use functional neurology to look at how systems like this one are working. My job is to explain what each test shows, and to say just as plainly what it cannot show. The antisaccade is a good example of both: it is a precise way to measure one kind of control, and it is a limited way to explain how you feel.

If you have been told your scans are normal but reading, screens or busy places still wear you out, that experience deserves a careful look. You are not imagining it, and you do not have to work out on your own which tests are worth doing.

California Brain & Spine Center | (818) 649-5300 | Calabasas, CA 91302. You can book online at californiabrainspine.janeapp.com.

This content is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Consult a qualified healthcare provider about your specific situation.