Abstract
Perceiving a stable world across saccades requires integration of pre- and post-saccadic information. We have previously proposed that transsaccadic integration depends on an object-mediated updating process (Tas et al., 2012). Specifically, if stability is achieved, and the post-saccadic target object is perceived as the continuation of the pre-saccadic object, the remembered properties of the pre-saccadic object are overwritten by the post-saccadic properties. However, if stability is not achieved (e.g., due to discontinuity in spatial or surface features across the saccade), pre-saccadic features are protected from being overwritten by the post-saccadic features, because the pre- and post-saccadic objects are mapped to different object representations. The present study provided a direct test of this object-mediated updating account. Participants executed a saccade to a colored target object. On some trials, visual stability was disrupted by blanking the target for 250 ms after saccade initiation, so that no object was visible for a brief period after the eyes landed (Deubel et al., 1996). To test the precision of the pre-saccadic object representation, on some trials the color of the saccade target was changed to a different color during the saccade. The magnitude of this color change was adjusted so that it did not disrupt visual stability. At the end of each trial, participants reported either the pre- or post-saccadic color using a continuous recall procedure, in which participants selected the appropriate color from a color wheel. Consistent with the object-mediated updating account, pre-saccadic color was preserved and could be reported with high precision when visual stability was disrupted (blank trials). However, when stability was achieved (no-blank trials), memory for the pre-saccadic color was significantly impaired, indicating that the process of integrating color representations into a single, persisting object representation leads to substantial overwriting of the initial properties of the object by subsequently perceived properties.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2014