Abstract
We easily keep track of moving objects while our eyes are fixating and this ability is not disrupted even when eye movements drastically change the tracked object’s coordinates on our retinas. Here we report evidence that this trans-saccadic tracking relies on pre-saccadic updating of attention that is deployed to the motion path of a tracked object. Observers were instructed to attentionally follow a colored blob that moved in discrete steps around a circular path centered at fixation. While observers fixated or prepared a saccade, we presented brief pulses of coherent motion that probed the allocation of spatial attention at different positions relative to the tracked object. Observers reported the direction of these motion pulses, which appeared randomly at past, current, and future locations of the tracked object. During fixation, attention was predominantly allocated to the current and next location of the tracked object. However, just before a saccade, attention was displaced away from these tracked locations in the direction opposite to the upcoming saccade. These new locations corresponded to retinal locations that the current and the next position of the tracked object would have after the saccade (i.e. their remapped locations). These results support the physiological evidence of remapping for a case of voluntary displacement of attention. They suggest that both the current and the next predicted step of a tracked object are remapped across a saccade.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013