Abstract
During natural vision, saccadic eye movements lead to frequent retinal image changes that result in different neuronal subpopulations representing the same visual feature across fixations. Despite these potentially disruptive changes to the neural representation, our visual percept is remarkably stable. Visual receptive field remapping, characterized as an anticipatory shift in the position of a neuron’s spatial receptive field immediately before saccades, has been proposed as one possible neural substrate for visual stability. Many of the specific properties of remapping, e.g., the exact direction of remapping relative to the saccade vector and the precise mechanisms by which remapping could instantiate stability, remain a matter of debate. Recent studies have also shown that visual attention, like perception itself, can be sustained across saccades, suggesting that the attentional control system can also compensate for eye movements. Classical remapping could have an attentional component, or there could be a distinct attentional analog of visual remapping. At this time we do not yet fully understand how the stability of attentional representations relates to perisaccadic receptive field shifts. In this review, we develop a vocabulary for discussing perisaccadic shifts in receptive field location and perisaccadic shifts of attentional focus, review and synthesize behavioral and neurophysiological studies of perisaccadic perception and perisaccadic attention, and identify open questions that remain to be experimentally addressed.
Highlights
Primates have evolved a sophisticated visual system to support active exploration of complex and often unpredictable dynamic natural environments
Posner and Cohen (1984) were the first to note that while the initial effect of an attentional cue is facilitative, facilitation lasts only a few hundred milliseconds and is followed by a period of suppression, during which behavioral responses to targets appearing at the cued location are impaired. This effect, known as inhibition of return (IOR), generally occurs for stimuli appearing at the spatiotopic location of the cue after a saccade (Posner and Cohen, 1984; Maylor and Hockey, 1985; Klein and Macinnes, 1999; Sapir et al, 2004; Mathôt and Theeuwes, 2010b; Pertzov et al, 2010; van Koningsbruggen et al, 2010; Hilchey et al, 2012; Satel et al, 2012; Krüger and Hunt, 2013), and this is consistent with the putative functional role of IOR in preventing attended items from being processed multiple times (Klein, 2000)
Forward and Convergent Remapping Forward remapping, where neuronal receptive fields (RFs) are presaccadically shifted by the upcoming saccade vector, has been suggested to provide a ‘‘preview’’ of stimuli that will appear in the RF after the saccade
Summary
Primates have evolved a sophisticated visual system to support active exploration of complex and often unpredictable dynamic natural environments. The functional role of changes in reference frame and the responses of spatiotopically coded neurons has not been examined in the context of doublestep saccades or other visual stability tasks.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.