Attentional trade-offs maintain the tracking of moving objects across saccades

Abstract

Szinte M, Carrasco M, Cavanagh P, Rolfs M. Attentional tradeoffs maintain the tracking of moving objects across saccades.

Visual attention is available at a task-relevant location rapidly after a saccade

“…At times well before and well after the saccade, subjects almost always detected the target change and their performance was near 100%. Performance began to drop around the time the fixation point jumped (dashed vertical line in Figure 2A), as expected from the previously reported diversion of pre-saccadic attentional resources towards the saccade task (Deubel and Schneider, 1996; Montagnini and Castet, 2007; Hoffman and Subramaniam, 1995) and the post-saccadic retinotopic location (Szinte et al, 2015). The performance then dropped steeply right before the saccade, as expected from the drop in visual sensitivity due to saccadic suppression (Diamond et al, 2000; Dorr and Bex, 2013; McConkie and Loschky, 2002).…”

“…Since each saccadic eye-movement leads to a change in the retinotopic representation of the visual scene, maintaining attention at a task-relevant spatial location across a saccade necessitates a rapid, saccade-synchronized shift of attentional modulation from the neuronal population representing the task-relevant location before the saccade to the one representing it after the saccade (Marino and Mazer, 2016; Yao et al, 2016). Currently, perceptual measurements in humans suggest a neuronal attention shift that starts before the saccade and continues after the saccade ends (Rolfs et al, 2011; Szinte et al, 2015; Golomb et al, 2008, 2010a, 2011; Jonikaitis et al, 2013). However, because these previous measurements used coarse temporal sampling and/or long-duration attentional probes, the precise time at which spatial attention becomes fully allocated to the task-relevant location after the saccade remains unclear.…”

The relationship between visual attention and visual working memory encoding: A dissociation between covert and overt orienting.

“…It is potentially problematic to equate working memory with attention given that there are clearly many varieties of attention (Alhazen, 1083; Luck & Vecera, 2002) and multiple dissociable working memory subsystems (Godijn & Theeuwes, 2012). Working memory for objects and surface features (VWM) is at least partially dissociable from spatial working memory (SpWM) (Szinte, Carrasco, Cavanagh, & Rolfs, 2015; Tresch, Sinnamon, & Seamon, 1993). Correspondingly, visual selection on the basis of surface features (feature-based attention) is at least partially dissociated from visual selection on the basis of location (spatial attention) (Bichot, Rossi, & Desimone, 2005; Martinez-Trujillo & Treue, 2004; Zhou & Desimone, 2011).…”

Pre-saccadic remapping relies on dynamics of spatial attention

“…They led to the proposal that convergent remapping could manifest behaviorally as a spatially unspecific spread of attention around the saccade target 17 . Remapping of spatial attention before saccades, as reported in behavioral studies, therefore could be reinterpreted as attentional spread between saccade target and remapped location [6][7][8][9] . Such interpretation of the convergent remapping effects predicts that locations surrounding the saccade target by up to 10 degrees of visual angle would receive all attentional benefits before the eyes start to move.…”

“…Later studies proposed that such visual compensation could be restricted to salient or task relevant objects, selected by spatial attention 4,5 . At the behavioral level, this compensation could result in anticipatory deployment of spatial attention to the retinal location a visual stimulus will occupy after the saccade [6][7][8][9] . Such anticipatory deployment could explain observations that attention is allocated at a spatial target location almost immediately after a saccade 7,10 .…”