Pre-saccadic remapping relies on dynamics of spatial attention
Abstract
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.
Data availability
All files are available from the OSF database: URL: https://osf.io/3tru6.
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Dataset of the Peripheral Remapping and Foveal Remapping of attention tasksOpen Science Framework, osf.io/3tru6.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SZ343/1)
- Martin Szinte
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (RA2191/1-1)
- Dragan Rangelov
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (704537)
- Martin Szinte
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: Experiments were designed according to the ethical requirements specified by the Faculty for Psychology and Pedagogics of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (approval number 13_b_2015) for experiments involving eye tracking. All participants provided written informed consent, including a consent to publish anonymized data.
Copyright
© 2018, Szinte et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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