Abstract
The world is perceived as stable, even when the retinal positions of objects change during saccadic eye movements. The underlying mechanisms of this stability remains debated. The retinal consequences of eye movements may be cancelled out or compensated by an equal and opposite signal (efference copy), and leftover discrepancies between the retinal and efference signals may be ignored (the assumption of prior of stability). In the laboratory, stability is often probed with the saccadic suppression of displacement (SSD) paradigm, in which observers report the direction of displacement of the target, which occurs during a saccade, as the eyes are in mid-flight . Performance is notoriously bad, but can be increased by stepping the target orthogonally to saccade direction, or by inserting a ~250 ms blank between saccade onset and target displacement. These manipulations may break object constancy and allow observers to access the discrepancy between the retinal consequences of the eye movement and the location of the post-saccadic target. The current project proposes to explore whether target features alleviate SSD. We hypothesized that when visual targets undergo a feature change these will relieve saccadic suppression, in a manner comparable to the blanking effect. Preliminary results suggest that SSD decreases when Gabor stimuli undergo an orientation change, suggesting that features do indeed participate in trans-saccadic correspondence.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017