Abstract
Evidence suggests that saccades and covert attention rely on shared neural architecture. Moreover, there is evidence that covert attentional processing is sensitive to surface-based representations of objects, and that saccades are influenced by the center-of-gravity of objects (Melcher & Kowler, 1999). It is not yet known, however, whether saccades obligatorily reflect surface structure of objects. METHOD: We asked whether saccade distractor-driven curvature is modulated by surface structure. In a saccade-to-target task we manipulated the presence and absence of a distractor, along with surface context, such that the distractor and target could be on the same or on different surfaces. FINDINGS: Three experiments found both early (initial curvature) and late (maximum curvature, landing distance) effects of the distractor on saccades (Van der Stigchel, Meeter, & Theeuwes, 2006), but none of these effects was affected by surface structure. We tentatively conclude that the saccade program does not obligatorily encode the perceptual organization of surfaces. Further experiments are exploring the contrast between these findings and those of Melcher & Kowler (1999).
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016