Attention Trade-Off for Localization and Saccadic Remapping

Predictive remapping may be the principal mechanism of maintaining visual stability, and attention is crucial for this process. We aimed to investigate the role of attention in predictive remapping in a dual task paradigm with two conditions, with and without saccadic remapping. The first task was to remember the clock hand position either after a saccade to the clock face (saccade condition requiring remapping) or after the clock being displaced to the fixation point (fixation condition with no saccade). The second task was to report the remembered location of a dot shown peripherally in the upper screen for 1 s. We predicted that performance in the two tasks would interfere in the saccade condition, but not in the fixation condition, because of the attentional demands needed for remapping with the saccade. For the clock estimation task, answers in the saccadic trials tended to underestimate the actual position by approximately 37 ms while responses in the fixation trials were closer to veridical. As predicted, the findings also revealed significant interaction between the two tasks showing decreased predicted accuracy in the clock task for increased error in the localization task, but only for the saccadic condition. Taken together, these results point at the key role of attention in predictive remapping.

Pre-saccadic remapping relies on dynamics of spatial attention

Each saccade shifts the projections of the visual scene on the retina. It has been proposed that the receptive fields of neurons in oculomotor areas are predictively remapped to account for these shifts. While remapping of the whole visual scene seems prohibitively complex, selection by attention may limit these processes to a subset of attended locations. Because attentional selection consumes time, remapping of attended locations should evolve in time, too. In our study, we cued a spatial location by presenting an attention-capturing cue at different times before a saccade and constructed maps of attentional allocation across the visual field. We observed no remapping of attention when the cue appeared shortly before saccade. In contrast, when the cue appeared sufficiently early before saccade, attentional resources were reallocated precisely to the remapped location. Our results show that pre-saccadic remapping takes time to develop suggesting that it relies on the spatial and temporal dynamics of spatial attention.

Pre-saccadic remapping relies on dynamics of spatial attention

SummaryEach eye movement shifts the projections of the visual scene on the retina. It has been proposed that the receptive fields of neurons in oculomotor areas are remapped pre-saccadically to account for these shifts. While remapping of the whole visual scene seems prohibitively complex, selection by visual attention may limit these processes to a subset of attended locations. Because attentional selection consumes time, remapping of attended locations should evolve in time, too. In our study, we cued a spatial location by presenting an attention capturing cue at different times before a saccade and constructed detailed maps of attentional allocation across the visual field. We observed no remapping when the cue appeared shortly before saccade. In contrast, when the cue appeared sufficiently early before saccade, attentional resources were reallocated to the remapped location. Our results suggest that pre-saccadic remapping is an attentional process relying on the spatial and temporal dynamics of visual attention.