Visual stability based on remapping of attention pointers

Abstract

When we move our eyes, we easily keep track of where relevant things are in the world. Recent proposals link this stability to the shifting of receptive fields of neurons in eye movement and attention control areas. Reports of "spatiotopic" visual aftereffects have also been claimed to support this shifting connectivity even at an early level, but these results have not held up. Here we describe the process of updating visual location as predictive shifts of location "pointers" to attended targets, analogous to predictive activation seen cross-modally. We argue that these location pointers, the core operators of spatial attention, are linked to identity information and that such a link is necessary in order to establish a workable visual architecture and to explain frequently reported positive spatiotopic biases. The challenge of eye movementsBecause of our frequent eye and head movements, the image of the world moves constantly on our retina. Despite this instability, we know where things are around us, at least well enough to get by. Hurrying down the stairs we may slip but quickly grab hold of a handrail that we only glimpsed briefly a moment earlier. This knowledge might be represented in the brain as an explicit spatiotopic (see Glossary) map of the scene, where object locations are given in world-based coordinates that are independent of the orientations of our eyes, head, and body. This conjecture of an explicit spatiotopic map has been proposed several times [1][2][3][4][5], but has been vigorously challenged as unnecessary and unsupported [6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. This long debate has been completely transformed by two recent discoveries: remapping and spatiotopic visual aftereffects. In remapping, a neuron in attention and saccade control areas can be activated by a stimulus far outside its receptive field, even in the opposite visual field, if an impending saccade will bring that stimulus into the classical receptive field of the cell [13][14][15][16][17][18] (see Figure 1). This predictive transfer of activation has been attributed to shifting receptive fields and been proposed as a possible mechanism for visual stability. In the case of visual aftereffects, adaptation to a tilted grating, for example, causes a vertical test to appear tilted away from vertical in the direction opposite the adaptation grating. This negative aftereffect is typically © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Corresponding author: Cavanagh, P. (patrick.cavanagh@parisdescartes.fr). Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. seen at the same retinal location as the adap...

Visual attention and stability

“…Cavanagh and colleagues propose yet another view on remapping [96]. According to them, remapping is best explained as predictive shifts of attention.…”

A neural mechanism for coordinate transformation predicts pre-saccadic remapping

“…Duhamel et al (1992) described neurons in the lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP) that respond when a stimulus is about to be brought into their receptive field by a saccade, even if the stimulus is extinguished before the gaze actually changes. While this phenomenon has initially been described as a shift of receptive fields, Cavanagh et al (2010) argued that it should more properly be interpreted as a remapping of attentional pointers. Such a retinocentric remapping could account for robust spatial memory without requiring a gaze-invariant representation, as has been shown in a neural model by Quaia et al (1998).…”

Shifting attention to neurons

“…Neuronal responses in areas that remap, such as LIP, encode stimulus properties in addition to location [7-9, Similar to Cavanagh et al [1], we believe that research on remapping can profit from an integration of research on spatial attention and visuomotor orienting, which have remained largely segregated. We take the article by Cavanagh et al as a welcome invitation to elucidate the neuronal mechanisms of remapping in relation to attention.…”

“…Cavanagh et al [1] challenge the traditional idea that neuronal activity caused by impending saccades alters receptive field (RF) locations. The authors argue, instead, that saccade-related signals cause shifts of attentional pointers that lack information about object identity but influence visual regions that encode object properties.…”

“…However, three points in the Cavanagh et al article [1] are problematic. First, some of the ideas regarding RFs are overly simple.…”