Abstract
Each eye movement shifts the projections of the visual scene on the retina. It has been proposed that the receptive fields of neurons in oculomotor areas are remapped pre-saccadically to account for these eye-movement induced retinal displacements. Remapping of the whole visual scene however seems prohibitively complex as it would require numerous connections as well as an efficient transfer of activity between a large number of neurons before each saccade. Selection by visual attention may simplify these processes by predicting what the world would look like after the saccade only for a subset of attended objects. Here we report clear evidence that pre-saccadic remapping is an attentional process. In our study, we cued a spatial location by presenting an attention capturing salient object at different times before a saccade and determined detailed spatio-temporal maps of attentional allocation across the visual field. We observed that when the cue appeared shortly before saccade onset, spatial attention was allocated both to the cued location and to the saccade goal. In contrast, when the cue appeared sufficiently early before saccade onset, attentional resources that were initially drawn to the cued location were now reallocated to its remapped location (i.e. the retinal location it will occupy after the saccade). Since selection by visual attention is time-consuming, our findings suggest that remapping is an attentional process, limited to visual objects that have been given sufficient time to be attended.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016