Abstract
Human vision relies on rapid eye movements (saccades) to bring peripheral visual targets to the fovea for high resolution inspection. Tracking stimuli across saccades is thought to involve a predictive visual remapping that anticipates the sensory effect of saccades, called visual remapping, and for saccade targets brought to the fovea, foveal remapping. At the neural level, visual remapping is found at later stages of processing involved in saccade planning but less so in early visual cortex. However, Recent EEG and fMRI studies suggest that foveal remapping may specifically involve early visual cortex. In particular, foveal remapping is thought to include feature-specific information about the saccade target and can even lead to misperception of a peripheral target that disappeared in saccade flight as being at the fovea (i.e., foveal ghosts). But localization to early visual cortex with EEG and fMRI is limited. Using single unit neurophysiology we examined if neural activity in the middle temporal (MT) area reflects a foveal remapping of stimulus motion. Marmoset monkeys made a saccade from central fixation point to one of two or three equally eccentric motion dot fields. We included three gaze-contingent conditions: “predictive” where the stimulus was unchanged during the saccade and thus could be anticipated at the fovea, “unexpected” where the motion direction changed, and “blanked” where the stimulus disappeared. Using linear arrays we recorded from MT foveal populations and trained a decoder to report the post-saccadic foveal motion from each trial. We found that we could decode the motion direction faster when the target was “predictive” versus “unexpected”. Further, on “blanked” trials we could decode the anticipated motion. These results demonstrate that foveal MT neurons receive feature predictions about a saccade target before it enters their receptive fields, providing the first single unit evidence of foveal remapping in early visual cortex.