David Marr (Marr,
1982) characterized vision as “
knowing what is where.” For much of the visual cortex, “knowing where” appears to be based in a
retinotopic coordinate system. With each eye, head and body movement, the image of the world shifts on the retina and across the retinotopic cortical areas. Despite these displacements, our perception of the world is for the most part reassuringly stationary and stable. Evidently, these displacements in retinal coordinates are corrected at some higher level to generate world-based coordinates. Whether these coordinates are explicitly represented in a spatiotopic map (d'Avossa, Shulman, Snyder, & Corbetta,
2006; Melcher & Morrone,
2003) or are only derived for individual objects when needed (Colby,
1998; Klier & Angelaki,
2008; Wolbers, Hegarty, Buchel, & Loomis,
2008) is a topic of intense debate. Clearly, a retinotopic map can be made to track object locations in the world if retinotopic target positions are shifted to compensate for eye movements (Colby & Duhamel,
1996; Goldberg & Colby,
1992; Wurtz,
2008). One approach to examine the coordinate frame of visual coding is to test for aftereffects of adaptation when an eye movement intervenes between adaptation and test. There have been reports of spatiotopic aftereffects—the presence of an aftereffect at the same spatial location as the adaptation but different retinal location—for tilt, shape and face adaptation (Melcher,
2005) as well as for motion (Ezzati, Golzar, & Afraz,
2008). As pointed out by Melcher (
2005), faces are among the stimuli thought to require the highest level of visual analysis (Afraz, Kiani, & Esteky,
2006; Kanwisher & Yovel,
2006; Leopold, O'Toole, Vetter, & Blanz,
2001; Leopold, Rhodes, Muller, & Jeffery,
2005; Moradi, Koch, & Shimojo,
2005) and therefore more likely to tap spatiotopic representations. For that reason, we focus here on several types of retinotopic versus spatiotopic coordinate frames (head centered and body centered) for the face aftereffect (FAE). There are a number of different face aftereffects in the literature (identity, gender, race and general shape distortion, etc). We chose the gender-specific aftereffect as it is well documented (Ng, Boynton, & Fine,
2008; Rhodes et al.,
2004; Webster, Kaping, Mizokami, & Duhamel,
2004) (also (Melcher,
2005)—gender adapt but identity test) and more robust in the periphery where we must test in order to compare retinotopy versus translational spatiotopy. Martelli et al, for example, has shown that face identification drops dramatically once fixation is outside the face itself (for frontal face views) (Martelli, Majaj, & Pelli,
2005).