Abstract
Just before a saccadic eye movement we experience changes in perception brought about by shifting neuronal receptive fields in oculomotor areas of the brain. These receptive field shifts and the associated perceptual phenomena are called presaccadic remapping. There remain open questions regarding 1) whether presaccadic remapping involves prediction of the post-saccadic location of visual targets and 2) whether presaccadic mapping occurs in parallel for locations across the visual field or only for a single attended location. In a series of previous studies, we used reverse correlation with a trans-saccadic luminance discrimination task to construct "perceptive fields" that revealed the spatiotemporal pattern of information integration in perceptual remapping. Observers monitored a rapidly changing luminance stream (target) flanked on either side by similarly constructed distractors while making a saccade and classified the target as light or dark. We found that perceptual remapping operates in manner consistent with predictive remapping, integrating information from the prospective (post-saccadic) retinal location of an attended target. Moreover, we showed that this remapping is attention-based and spatially precise. In the current study, we extended the reverse-correlation analysis to determine whether presaccadic remapping occurs in parallel across multiple locations. In the revised task, observers simultaneously attended two flickering targets across a single saccade and were asked to make independent luminance judgments about each of the two targets. The reverse correlation analyses revealed predictive presaccadic remapping at both target locations, each consistent with the pattern observed in the previous single-target studies. These results suggest that a saccade can trigger predictive attentional remapping independently and in parallel across multiple locations in the visual field.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017