Abstract
Saccadic eye movements evoke a motion that disrupts stable perception. One way to prevent this disruption is to remap visual features before saccades and to maintain the remapped representation during saccades. Since object recognition is important, previous studies have focused on the remapping of objects. However, we investigated the influence of pre-saccadic remapping on the background rather than objects. In Experiment 1, a display was presented with a fixation point in the center of the left visual field, a 5° sine grating tilted 20 or −20° (figure) located in above or below 4° of the fixation, and a grating tilted oppositely to the figure (background) was presented in the entire left visual field. This display was shown for 3 seconds to produce tilt aftereffects, followed by the fixation period for 300 ∼ 500 ms. After this variable fixation, participants were required to make a 10° saccade. Their task was to determine whether a sine grating (a probe) presented either above or below the saccadic target was tilted towards the left or the right. Note that the probe could appear in the remapped location of the figure or the background. We found strong tilt aftereffects in the background region as well as in the figure region, suggesting that background information was also remapped to the location of the saccadic target. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether the remapped representation was maintained during saccades and if the effect of remapping could be generalized to orientation-specific aftereffects. Figure-ground configuration was similar as in Experiment 1, but we measured threshold elevation during saccades rather than tilt aftereffects before saccades. We again found significant threshold elevation for both the figure and the ground. Thus, our results suggest that remapping before and during saccades occurs for both the figure and the background.
This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (2009-0089090).