Allocation of attention across saccades

Abstract

Whenever the eyes move, spatial attention must keep track of the locations of attended targets as they shift on the retina. We report the first direct evidence for transsaccadic updating of visual attention to cued targets. While observers prepared a saccade, we flashed a salient cue in their visual periphery and measured the allocation of spatial attention before and after the saccade using a tilt discrimination task. Across the saccade, attention was sustained at the cue’s location in the world, despite the cue’s large shift on the retina; attention at the retinal location of the cue decayed quickly after the eye movement. Moreover, just before the saccade, attention was allocated to the cue’s future retinal location, its remapped location. This behavioral result supports the physiological evidence for the predictive activation of some neurons seen when an attended stimulus will fall in their receptive field after a saccade.

Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2012