Abstract
Across eye movements, the visual system receives two successive images of the pre- and the post-saccadic retinal projections of the visual field. The existence of a mechanism integrating these images across saccades is still nowadays a matter of debate. One way to study trans-saccadic information transfer and integration is to use a blanking paradigm. Indeed, while a small trans-saccadic object displacement normally stays unnoticed, blanking the object after the saccade makes the same displacement easily noticeable. Recently, it was shown that this blanking effect is reduced when the trans-saccadic object is isoluminant relative to the background. Using the blanking paradigm, we here study the effect of luminance and isoluminance on the transfer of a visual feature across saccades. Observers performed an eye movement to a peripheral Gabor grating and discriminated an orientation change that occurred across the saccade. Pre- and post-saccadic gratings were either isoluminant or contained luminance contrast. The post-saccadic Gabor was either presented with or without a 200 ms blank. With non-isoluminant objects we observed an improvement of discrimination with a blank, i.e., a blanking effect for an orientation change across the saccade. Interestingly however, discrimination did not benefit from the blanking if the pre-saccadic grating was isoluminant. The results demonstrate that not just displacement detection, but also the trans-saccadic integration of visual features can benefit from post-saccadic blanking. Moreover, trans-saccadic feature integration turns out to be dependent on luminance contrast. We propose that these effects reflect the existence of a trans-saccadic feature integration mechanism that relies largely on luminance contrast.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018