Abstract
In active vision, relevant objects are selected in the peripheral visual field and then brought to the central visual field by saccadic eye movements. Hence, there are usually two sources of visual information about an object: information from peripheral vision before a saccade and information from central vision after a saccade. The well-known differences in processing and perception between the peripheral and the central visual field lead to the question whether and how the two pieces of information are matched and combined. This talk will provide an overview about different mechanisms that may alleviate differences between peripheral and central representations and allow for a seamless perception across saccades. Transsaccadic integration results in a weighted combination of peripheral and central information according to their relative reliability, such that uncertainty is minimized. It is a resource-limited process that does not apply to the whole visual field, but only to attended objects. Nevertheless, it is not strictly limited to the saccade target, but can be flexibly directed to other relevant locations. Transsaccadic prediction uses peripheral information to estimate the most likely appearance in the central visual field. This allows appearance to be calibrated in the peripheral and central visual field. Such a calibration is not only relevant to maintain perceptual stability across saccades, but also to match templates for visual search in peripheral and central vision.