Abstract
Every waking second, we make three saccadic eye movements which move our retinal images. Thus, to attain a coherent image of the world we need to remember visuo-spatial information across saccades. But transsaccadic memory remains poorly understood. Crucially, there has been a debate whether transsaccadic memory differs for saccades to the left or right side or whether there are differences for information remembered in the left or right visual field. However, previous studies have probed working memory with minimal cognitive loads. In the present study, we employed a transsaccadic memory task that has been recently demonstrated to correlate with established measures of working memory. Using this task with higher memory loads and with horizontal as well as vertical saccades, we captured systematic and unsystematic errors that we then submitted to principal component analysis. We extracted two components of transsaccadic memory that were associated with working memory precision and accuracy, respectively. Component 1 showed greater error for the left visual field. Component 2 showed a disadvantage for the right visual field. For both components, performance on this memory task revealed differentiation between inter and intra-hemispheric remapping where more performance error was observed when saccades caused a shift of memory item representations between visual fields compared to remapping within the same visual field. With the added disadvantage of making saccades, information crossing the corpus callosum might reduce its fidelity, therefore explaining the overall reduced performance during interhemispheric remapping compared to when information remains in the same hemisphere, irrespective of which hemifield the item was primarily presented in. Our results are consistent with the idea that transsaccadic memory is similar to “fixational” forms of visuo-spatial working memory, but not in a straightforward manner.