Abstract
People make saccadic eye movements several times per second to efficiently explore visual environments. As a result, visual input projected onto the retina drastically changes following each saccade, and the visual system is required to process new visual information within a few hundred milliseconds before making another saccade. To explore the nature of post-saccadic perception of new visual information, we investigated how scene images are processed immediately after a saccadic eye movement. Specifically, we tested whether scene categorization performance changes when a scene image is presented shortly after a saccade and whether such changes in post-saccadic scene perception are contingent on specific spatial frequency information. In a behavioral experiment, subjects were asked to fixate on a dot and then make a saccade when the dot moves to another location. Upon saccade completion, a large scene image was presented after either 5 ms (short delay condition) or 500 ms (long delay condition). The image was presented for 50 ms, and subjects performed a 6-AFC scene categorization task (beach, city, forest, highway, mountain, office). Spatial frequency information was manipulated to present full-spectrum scene images (FS) or images filtered to contain only high spatial frequency (HSF; > 6 cpd) or low spatial frequency (LSF; < 1 cpd) information. We compared scene categorization accuracy across post-saccadic delay (short vs long delay) and spatial frequency (HSF vs LSF) conditions. Results showed decreased scene categorization performance in the short delay condition compared to the long delay condition, indicating impaired scene perception immediately after a saccadic eye movement. Additionally, there was no interaction between the delay and spatial frequency conditions, suggesting that the impaired post-saccadic scene perception was not specific to either high or low spatial frequency information. These results suggest impaired processing of low and high spatial frequency scene information shortly after a saccadic eye movement.