Pre-saccadic remapping relies on dynamics of spatial attention

Abstract
Data availability
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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.

The following data sets were generated

(2018) Dataset of the Peripheral Remapping and Foveal Remapping of attention tasks
Open Science Framework, osf.io/3tru6.

https://osf.io/3tru6

Article and author information

Author details

Martin Szinte

Department of Cognitive Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

For correspondence
martin.szinte@gmail.com

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-2040-4005
Donatas Jonikaitis

Department of Neurobiology, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-9851-0903
Dragan Rangelov

Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Heiner Deubel

Allgemeine und Experimentelle Psychologie, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Munich, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

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

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.