Abstract
The retinotopic organization of visual information is shifted with each saccade. Yet, we experience a continuous stream of visual information. The discrepancy between the disrupted retinotopic organization and apparent perceptual continuity of visual information has been studied for centuries. There is still an ongoing debate whether perceptual continuity across saccades is illusory, or whether retinotopic representations of visual information are updated across saccades. Recent studies provided a considerable amount of evidence in favour of spatiotopic updating, enabling perceptual continuity. Importantly, these studies showed that the build-up of spatiotopic coding takes up to 500 ms, plus saccade latency. Here, we challenge this view by showing that spatiotopic updating can take place within the saccadic latency interval (±200 ms). In our experiments, we used a motion illusion (High Phi) where the random texture of a slowly rotating annulus is replaced with four different random textures. Even though the textures are not correlated, the slow rotation can induce a strong percept of a large backward jump when the textures are replaced. We have previously shown that the illusory backward jump in the High Phi illusion can be induced spatiotopically, using long presaccadic inducer intervals (Fabius et al., 2016, Sci.Rep.). Here, we show that this updating can be detected even when using presaccadic inducer intervals as short as saccade latencies to visual onsets. These results provide evidence for rapid spatiotopic updating of visual information across saccades in much shorter regime than previously assumed.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017