Allocation of attention across saccades

Abstract

Whenever the eyes move, spatial attention must keep track of the locations of targets as they shift on the retina. This study investigated transsaccadic updating of visual attention to cued targets. While observers prepared a saccade, we flashed an irrelevant, but salient, color cue in their visual periphery and measured the allocation of spatial attention before and after the saccade using a tilt discrimination task. We found that just before the saccade, attention was allocated to the cue's future retinal location, its predictively "remapped" location. Attention was sustained at the cue's location in the world across the saccade, despite the change of retinal position whereas it decayed quickly at the retinal location of the cue, after the eye landed. By extinguishing the color cue across the saccade, we further demonstrate that the visual system relies only on predictive allocation of spatial attention, as the presence of the cue after the saccade did not substantially affect attentional allocation. These behavioral results support and extend physiological evidence showing predictive activation of visual neurons when an attended stimulus will fall in their receptive field after a saccade. Our results show that tracking of spatial locations across saccades is a plausible consequence of physiological remapping.

Spatial constancy of attention across eye movements is mediated by the presence of visual objects

“…However, it is unlikely that the predictability of the saccade contributed to faster remapping, as other studies have found that attention is predictively remapped in advance of a saccade using unpredictable saccades (Jonikaitis et al, 2013;Rolfs et al, 2011).…”

“…One mechanism that has been proposed to explain this ability consists in the updating (remapping) of target locations to compensate for each eye movement. This process has been documented physiologically in saccade and attention areas (Duhamel, Colby, & Goldberg, 1992;Fecteau & Munoz, 2006;Sommer & Wurtz, 2006;Wurtz, Joiner, & Berman, 2011) and has been demonstrated behaviorally with probes that reveal the location of attentional benefits before and after eye movements (Hunt & Cavanagh, 2011;Jonikaitis, Szinte, Rolfs, & Cavanagh, 2013;Rolfs, Jonikaitis, Deubel, & Cavanagh, 2011). A number of review papers have suggested that the remapping process offers a sparse form of visual constancy by predicting where targets will be in retinotopic coordinates following each eye movement (Berman & Colby, 2009;Cavanagh, Hunt, Afraz, & Rolfs, 2010;Hall & Colby, 2011;Mathôt & Theeuwes, 2011;Wurtz, 2008).…”

“…More recent evidence of predictive remapping of attention has come from behavioral studies that investigated the dynamics of visual attention just before (Hunt & Cavanagh, 2011;Rolfs et al, 2011) or across (Jonikaitis et al, 2013) eye movements. These studies have shown that even before a saccade occurs, attention moves in the opposite direction, toward retinotopic locations that will align to the target's location in space once the saccade is completed.…”

Predictive remapping gives rise to environmental inhibition of return

“…Predictive Table 1 Mean RTs and error rates at the cued location, the remapped location, the future retinal location, and corresponding control locations neuronal discharges that have been observed in multiple brain regions generally occur within about 100 ms before saccade onset (e.g., Duhamel et al, 1992;Umeno & Goldberg, 1997;Walker et al, 1995). In the non-IOR behavioral studies mentioned in the introduction, robust effects also are consistently observed at the remapped location only within 100 ms before saccade onset (e.g., Harrison et al, 2013;Hunt & Cavanagh, 2011;Jonikaitis et al, 2013;Rolfs et al, 2011). Although remapped neuronal responses have been shown in all regions that have been linked to IOR, available evidence seems to suggest that environmental IOR is most likely mapped in parietal regions.…”

“…Error bars represent ± 1 SEM. **p < 0.01 that it could be a mechanism underlying spatial attention (Jonikaitis, Szinte, Rolfs, & Cavanagh, 2013;Rolfs, Jonikaitis, Deubel, & Cavanagh, 2011).…”