Saccadic remapping of object-selective information

Abstract

Saccadic remapping, a presaccadic increase in neural activity when a saccade is about to bring an object into a neuron’s receptive field, may be crucial for our perception of a stable world. Studies of perception and saccadic remapping, like ours, focus on the presaccadic acquisition of information from the saccade target, with no direct reference to underlying physiology. While information is known to be acquired prior to a saccade, it is unclear whether object-selective or feature-specific information is remapped. To test this, we performed a series of psychophysical experiments in which we presented a peripheral, non-foveated face as a presaccadic target. The target face disappeared at saccade onset. After making a saccade to the location of the peripheral target face (which was no longer visible), subjects misperceived the expression of a subsequent, foveally-presented neutral face as being repelled away from the peripheral presaccadic face target. This effect was similar to a sequential shape contrast or negative aftereffect, but required a saccade, as covert attention was not sufficient to generate the illusion. Additional experiments further revealed that inverting the faces disrupted the illusion, suggesting that presaccadic remapping is object-selective and not based on low-level features. Our results demonstrate that saccadic remapping can be an object-selective process, spatially tuned to the target of the saccade and distinct from covert attention in the absence of a saccade.

Predictive remapping of visual features beyond saccadic targets

“…This hypothesis was further supported by several subsequent studies (Harrison et al, 2013;Hunt & Cavanagh, 2011;Jonikaitis, Szinte, Rolfs, & Cavanagh, 2013;Puntiroli, Kerzel, & Born, 2015). However, in recent years a number of studies have provided evidence that feature information, in addition to attentional pointers, is also involved in transsaccadic remapping (Cha & Chong, 2013;Demeyer, De Graef, Wagemans, & Verfaillie, 2009, 2010Demeyer, Graef, Verfaillie, & Wagemans, 2011;Eccelpoel, Germeys, Graef, & Verfaillie, 2008;Edwards, VanRullen, & Cavanagh, 2017;Fracasso, Caramazza, & Melcher, 2010;Gordon, Vollmer, & Frankl, 2008;Habtegiorgis, Rifai, Lappe, & Wahl, 2018;Harrison & Bex, 2014;Hayhoe, Lachter, & Feldman, 1991;He et al, 2017;Herwig & Schneider, 2014;Koller & Rafal, 2018;Melcher, 2007;Nakashima & Sugita, 2017;Oostwoud Wijdenes, Marshall, & Bays, 2015;Paeye, Collins, & Cavanagh, 2017;Prime, Niemeier, & Crawford, 2006;Prime, Vesia, & Crawford, 2011;Sligte et al, 2017;Wittenberg, Bremmer, & Wachtler, 2008;Wolfe & Whitney, 2015;Zimmermann et al, 2013;Zimmermann et al, 2017;Zimmermann, Weidner, Abdollahi, & Fink, 2016;Zirnsak et al, 2011). Our study is in line with these studies, and further...…”

Extra-foveal Processing of Object Semantics Guides Early Overt Attention During Visual Search

“…Conventionally, the visual field is characterised by three regions, going from the centre to the periphery of the retina: (1) the fovea, which subtends a visual angle of 1°eccentricity and is responsible for high resolution vision; (2) the parafovea, which stretches out to 4-5°; and (3) the periphery, which extends beyond the parafovea and cover the rest of the visual field (see Larson & Loschky, 2009 for provising a brief summary in the context of scene gist recognition). Although the visual acuity strongly decreases in the parafovea and in the periphery, i.e., in extra-foveal vision (e.g., Strasburger, Rentschler, & Jüttner, 2011), the area of the visual field from which observers can accrue useful information is quite large (see Rayner, 2014;Rosenholtz, 2016;B. Wolfe, Dobres, Rosenholtz, & Reimer, 2017, for reviews) and it can roughly corresponds to 8°in each direction from fixation for visual search in naturalistic scenes (Nuthmann, 2013).…”

Spatiotopic updating of visual feature information

“…They demonstrated that the visual system predictively integrates motion signals between the current and the postsaccadic retinotopic location during the period of saccade preparation. Finally, also higher level features as facial expressions are remapped across saccades (Melcher, 2005;Wolfe & Whitney, 2015). All these studies suggest that transsaccadic remapping takes into account visual feature information rather than shifting only abstract position information.…”