Abstract
Saccadic eye movements (saccades) disrupt the continuous flow of visual information, yet our perception of the visual world remains uninterrupted. Here we assess the representation of the visual scene across saccades from single-trial spike trains of extrastriate visual areas, using a combined electrophysiology and statistical modeling approach. Using a model-based decoder we generate a high temporal resolution readout of visual information, and identify the specific changes in neurons’ spatiotemporal sensitivity that underly an integrated perisaccadic representation of visual space. Our results show that by maintaining a memory of the visual scene, extrastriate neurons produce an uninterrupted representation of the visual world. Extrastriate neurons exhibit a late response enhancement close to the time of saccade onset, which preserves the latest pre-saccadic information until the post-saccadic flow of retinal information resumes. These results show how our brain exploits available information to maintain a representation of the scene while visual inputs are disrupted.
Highlights
Saccadic eye movements disrupt the continuous flow of visual information, yet our perception of the visual world remains uninterrupted
This decoding framework revealed that throughout saccades neural activity represented either the presaccadic or the postsaccadic visual scene, leaving no gap in the visual representation. This approach allowed us to decompose the spatiotemporal sensitivity of individual neurons to trace the components required for this transsaccadic integration. This feature enabled us to identify a neural phenomenon as a key player for transsaccadic integration: extrastriate neurons exhibit a late enhancement of responses to stimuli appearing in the original receptive field (RF) around saccade onset, which preserves the history of the visual scene until the new retinal information arrives
In order to assess how extrastriate neurons represent the visual world we needed to trace the dynamics of their sensitivity as it changes during saccades
Summary
Saccadic eye movements (saccades) disrupt the continuous flow of visual information, yet our perception of the visual world remains uninterrupted. This approach allowed us to decompose the spatiotemporal sensitivity of individual neurons to trace the components required for this transsaccadic integration This feature enabled us to identify a neural phenomenon as a key player for transsaccadic integration: extrastriate neurons exhibit a late enhancement of responses to stimuli appearing in the original RF around saccade onset, which preserves the history of the visual scene until the new retinal information arrives. This phenomenon, which was verified in both V4 and MT, reveals how by actively maintaining the presaccadic representation, extrastriate neurons can contribute to a stable uninterrupted perception of the visual scene during saccades
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