Abstract
The experience of our visual surroundings appears continuous, contradicting the erratic nature of visual processing due to saccades. The visual system constructs a continuous experience by integrating pre-saccadic and post-saccadic visual input. Because saccades rarely land exactly at the intended location, transsaccadic integration would need to be robust against variations in actual saccade execution. In the current study participants reported a feature (here color) of the saccade target, which occasionally changed slightly during the saccade. In transsaccadic change-trials, participants reported a mixture of the pre- and post-saccadic color, indicating transsaccadic integration. Importantly, saccade landing distance was not a significant predictor for the color reported. In a second experiment, we used a global effect paradigm in which a distractor appeared together with the saccade target, causing most saccades to land in between the saccade target and distractor. Again, there was no effect of saccade landing point on the outcome of transsaccadic integration. Surprisingly, this even holds for saccades landing close to the distractor, remote from the target. Therefore, transsaccadic perception is robust against deviations in saccade landing point even when saccades land outside of the range of everyday oculomotor variance. Transsaccadic integration therefore depends on the intended saccade location, not on the actual landing position of the eye.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018