Abstract
Predictive remapping may be the principal mechanism of maintaining visual stability, and attention is crucial for this process. We aimed to investigate the role of attention in predictive remapping in a dual task paradigm with two conditions, with and without saccadic remapping. The first task was to remember the clock hand position either after a saccade to the clock face (saccade condition requiring remapping) or after the clock being displaced to the fixation point (fixation condition with no saccade). The second task was to report the remembered location of a dot shown peripherally in the upper screen for 1 s. We predicted that performance in the two tasks would interfere in the saccade condition, but not in the fixation condition, because of the attentional demands needed for remapping with the saccade. For the clock estimation task, answers in the saccadic trials tended to underestimate the actual position by approximately 37 ms while responses in the fixation trials were closer to veridical. As predicted, the findings also revealed significant interaction between the two tasks showing decreased predicted accuracy in the clock task for increased error in the localization task, but only for the saccadic condition. Taken together, these results point at the key role of attention in predictive remapping.
Highlights
When performing our everyday activities, we can attend several objects at a time even though some of them are located outside the fovea
Perceptual load may be implicated in phenomena such as attentional blink, inattentional blindness, or inattentional deafness under high visual perceptual load when the amount of information in processing the task is considerable [6,7]
We used a dual task paradigm to test the role of attention in predictive remapping
Summary
When performing our everyday activities, we can attend several objects at a time even though some of them are located outside the fovea. Our attention has a limited capacity [1], so it selects and prioritizes tasks according to the needs of the moment. The load theory of attentional selection [3,4,5] further suggested a direct trade-off such that as attended items require more perceptual resources, unattended items or distractors get less resources and vice versa. This can be interpreted as a competition for resource allocation between different cognitive processes with executive control needed in cases of irrelevant distractors. Perceptual load may be implicated in phenomena such as attentional blink (when an observer fails to detect the second target if it occurs within 200–500 ms after the first), inattentional blindness (when an observer fails to detect a stimulus because of the attentional lack rather than any vision deficits), or inattentional deafness (which refers to neglecting unexpected auditory information) under high visual perceptual load when the amount of information in processing the task is considerable [6,7]
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