Abstract
It is currently unknown whether changes to the oculomotor system can induce changes to the distribution of spatial attention around a fixated target. Previous studies have used perceptual performance tasks to show that adaptation of saccadic eye movements affects dynamic properties of visual attention, in particular, attentional shifts to a cued location. In this study, we examined the effects of saccadic adaptation on the static distribution of visual attention around fixation (attentional field). We used the classic double step adaptation procedure and a flanker task to test for differences in the attentional field after forward and backward adaptation. Reaction time (RT) measures revealed that the shape of the attentional field changed significantly after backward adaptation as shown through altered interference from distracters at different eccentricities but not after forward adaptation. This finding reveals that modification of saccadic amplitudes can affect metrics of not only dynamic properties of attention but also its static properties. A major implication is that the neural mechanisms underlying fundamental selection mechanisms and the oculomotor system can reweight each other.
Highlights
Our visual system is limited in its capacity to process information
Saccadic gain during the adaptation task was measured for the primary saccades that started within 2◦ of visual angle of the initial fixation marker and whose direction did not deviate by more than 14◦ from the direction of the post-saccadic target
It was unknown whether static spatial attentional mechanisms, such as the attentional field, are affected by saccadic adaptation and our results provide an initial insight into the nature of this relationship
Summary
Our visual system is limited in its capacity to process information. While there is a large body of research addressing dynamic (Krose and Julesz, 1989; Hoffman and Subramaniam, 1995; Deubel and Schneider, 1996; Itti and Koch, 2000; Carrasco and McElree, 2001; Nothdurft, 2002; Schneider and Deubel, 2002) and static properties (Eriksen and Yeh, 1985; Eriksen and James, 1986; LaBerge and Brown, 1986; Lavie, 1995; Intriligator and Cavanagh, 2001; Müller et al, 2005) of attention separately, little is known about the relationship between these two characteristics
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