Abstract
Studies of saccadic remapping dispute whether remapping is a local attentional facilitation (Rolfs et.al, 2010; Cavanagh et.al, 2010) or if it is specific to the object targeted with the saccade (Melcher 2009; Burr and Morrone, 2011). We probed this question using the face aftereffect (FAE), where the perceived gender, emotion and identity of a face changes following foveal adaptation (Leopold et.al., 2001; Webster, 2004; Kovács et.al., 2005). To test this, we induced the FAE across saccades by briefly presenting different emotional faces (happy and sad) as presaccadic adaptors at 15° eccentricity, one each to the left and right of a central fixation dot, then cued subjects to saccade to a target on or near one adaptor. Once the saccade terminated, a test face was presented foveally and subjects judged whether the morphed test face was more happy or sad. Using the method of constant stimuli, we estimated the point of subjective equality (PSE) in each adaptation condition and compared the difference of PSEs as a measure of the FAE. All subjects showed a significant negative FAE for perceived emotion, despite the fact that the adaptor face was presented in the periphery and did not retinally overlap the test face. Crucially, the adaptor was removed from the screen as soon as the saccade began; therefore, the saccade-gated FAE that we observed must be induced presaccadically, suggesting that peripheral object-level information is acquired presaccadically. In addition, by varying the saccade target location on each trial and calculating saccade error, we estimated the spatial tuning of the presaccadic FAE; the effect diminishes as saccade error increases. That is, saccades needed to land on the peripherally presented adaptor face to produce a foveal FAE. Our results suggest that presaccadic remapping acquires information about the target object and that this information can bias postsaccadic perception.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014