December 2022
Volume 22, Issue 14
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   December 2022
Instructed but not spontaneous pre-saccadic attention improves face discrimination performance
Author Affiliations & Notes
  • Olga Kreichman
    Bar Ilan University
  • Yoram Bonneh
    Bar Ilan University
  • Sharon Gilaie-Dotan
    Bar Ilan University
    UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Footnotes
    Acknowledgements  This study was funded by ISF Individual Research Grant 1485/18 to SGD and Lev-Zion Scholarship for Outstanding Ph.D. Students to OK
Journal of Vision December 2022, Vol.22, 4495. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.4495
  • Views
  • Share
  • Tools
    • Alerts
      ×
      This feature is available to authenticated users only.
      Sign In or Create an Account ×
    • Get Citation

      Olga Kreichman, Yoram Bonneh, Sharon Gilaie-Dotan; Instructed but not spontaneous pre-saccadic attention improves face discrimination performance. Journal of Vision 2022;22(14):4495. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.4495.

      Download citation file:


      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

      ×
  • Supplements
Abstract

Pre-saccadic attention is known to selectively enhance performance at saccadic target location prior to saccade execution, but this phenomenon has mostly been investigated during experimentally-dictated saccade-related instructions which may have modulated performance enhancement. Here 67 participants performed center-periphery discrimination of faces in foveal to parafoveal locations (≤4°, appearing for 200ms). Despite being instructed to keep fixation throughout the experiment, 2/3 of the participants performed internally-driven saccades towards parafoveal targets that could appear in 1 of 13 random locations. The rest of the participants kept fixation. These two different individual eye-movement behaviours (hoppers, fixators) were also substantiated by unsupervised k-means clustering algorithm, and were consistent across visual categories (inverted faces: 31/32, houses: 21/23). As expected, hoppers’ performance significantly improved when their saccades landed before target disappeared (relative to when landing after target disappeared). However, given the expected pre-saccadic attention performance improvement, it was surprising that hoppers’ performance (when landing after target disappeared) was not significantly better than that of fixators. To examine whether instructed pre-saccadic attention is required to improve performance, participants underwent another session. First, their characteristic saccadic behavior was verified (in 30/33). Fixators were then asked to perform a saccade towards the target immediately after it disappeared, assuming this will result in typical pre-saccadic attention improvement, and hoppers were asked to refrain from hopping, to examine if this will decrease performance. The results confirmed our assumptions with fixators showing significant improvements following the instructed post-stimulus saccades, corresponding to typical pre-saccadic attention results, while hoppers performance did not change. Our results of improved performance for instructed but not for spontaneous pre-saccadic attention suggest that pre-saccadic attention during naturalistic behavior may in fact span a much broader range of influences on behavior than are currently known, and may also support a dissociation between saccade planning and peripheral enhancement.

×
×

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

Sign in or purchase a subscription to access this content. ×

You must be signed into an individual account to use this feature.

×