Pre-saccadic remapping relies on dynamics of spatial attention

  1. Martin Szinte  Is a corresponding author
  2. Donatas Jonikaitis
  3. Dragan Rangelov
  4. Heiner Deubel
  1. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
  2. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stanford University School of Medicine, United States
  3. The University of Queensland, Australia
  4. Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Germany

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

Article and author information

Author details

  1. 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.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-2040-4005
  2. 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.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-9851-0903
  3. Dragan Rangelov

    Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  4. 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.

Reviewing Editor

  1. Andrew J King, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

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.

Version history

  1. Received: April 16, 2018
  2. Accepted: December 30, 2018
  3. Accepted Manuscript published: December 31, 2018 (version 1)
  4. Version of Record published: January 10, 2019 (version 2)

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.

Metrics

  • 1,923
    views
  • 280
    downloads
  • 32
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Martin Szinte
  2. Donatas Jonikaitis
  3. Dragan Rangelov
  4. Heiner Deubel
(2018)
Pre-saccadic remapping relies on dynamics of spatial attention
eLife 7:e37598.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.37598

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.37598

Further reading

    1. Neuroscience
    Daniel Hoops, Robert Kyne ... Cecilia Flores
    Short Report

    Dopamine axons are the only axons known to grow during adolescence. Here, using rodent models, we examined how two proteins, Netrin-1 and its receptor, UNC5C, guide dopamine axons toward the prefrontal cortex and shape behaviour. We demonstrate in mice (Mus musculus) that dopamine axons reach the cortex through a transient gradient of Netrin-1-expressing cells – disrupting this gradient reroutes axons away from their target. Using a seasonal model (Siberian hamsters; Phodopus sungorus) we find that mesocortical dopamine development can be regulated by a natural environmental cue (daylength) in a sexually dimorphic manner – delayed in males, but advanced in females. The timings of dopamine axon growth and UNC5C expression are always phase-locked. Adolescence is an ill-defined, transitional period; we pinpoint neurodevelopmental markers underlying this period.

    1. Neuroscience
    Baba Yogesh, Georg B Keller
    Research Article

    Acetylcholine is released in visual cortex by axonal projections from the basal forebrain. The signals conveyed by these projections and their computational significance are still unclear. Using two-photon calcium imaging in behaving mice, we show that basal forebrain cholinergic axons in the mouse visual cortex provide a binary locomotion state signal. In these axons, we found no evidence of responses to visual stimuli or visuomotor prediction errors. While optogenetic activation of cholinergic axons in visual cortex in isolation did not drive local neuronal activity, when paired with visuomotor stimuli, it resulted in layer-specific increases of neuronal activity. Responses in layer 5 neurons to both top-down and bottom-up inputs were increased in amplitude and decreased in latency, whereas those in layer 2/3 neurons remained unchanged. Using opto- and chemogenetic manipulations of cholinergic activity, we found acetylcholine to underlie the locomotion-associated decorrelation of activity between neurons in both layer 2/3 and layer 5. Our results suggest that acetylcholine augments the responsiveness of layer 5 neurons to inputs from outside of the local network, possibly enabling faster switching between internal representations during locomotion.