Pre-saccadic remapping relies on dynamics of spatial attention.

Martin Szinte,Dragan Rangelov,Donatas Jonikaitis,Heiner Deubel

doi:10.7554/elife.37598

Abstract

Each saccade shifts the projections of the visual scene on the retina. It has been proposed that the receptive fields of neurons in oculomotor areas are predictively remapped to account for these shifts. While remapping of the whole visual scene seems prohibitively complex, selection by attention may limit these processes to a subset of attended locations. Because attentional selection consumes time, remapping of attended locations should evolve in time, too. In our study, we cued a spatial location by presenting an attention-capturing cue at different times before a saccade and constructed maps of attentional allocation across the visual field. We observed no remapping of attention when the cue appeared shortly before saccade. In contrast, when the cue appeared sufficiently early before saccade, attentional resources were reallocated precisely to the remapped location. Our results show that pre-saccadic remapping takes time to develop suggesting that it relies on the spatial and temporal dynamics of spatial attention.

Highlights

Our eye movements shift the visual scene on our retinas
We found that when the cue appeared shortly before saccade onset, spatial attention was allocated at the cued location but not at its remapped location
We observed that attention consistently shifted to the saccade target location and, importantly, did not spread to other locations surrounding it

Summary

Introduction

Our eye movements shift the visual scene on our retinas. These shifts go largely unnoticed and do not prevent efficient interaction with objects surrounding us. It has been proposed that the visual system compensates for such shifts using a copy of the motor command (Sperry, 1950) to anticipate changes in the visual scene from the planned eye movement. Such an active mechanism could maintain an impression of space constancy and allow us to effectively interact with visual objects. This compensation could result in anticipatory deployment of spatial attention to the retinal location that a visual stimulus will occupy after the saccade (Jonikaitis and Theeuwes, 2013; Rolfs et al, 2011; Szinte et al, 2015; Szinte et al, 2016). Such anticipatory deployment could explain observations that attention is allocated at a spatial target location almost immediately after a saccade (Jonikaitis et al, 2013; Yao et al, 2016b)

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Results

Conclusion