Saccade suppression depends on context

Abstract
Data availability
Article and author information
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Abstract

Although our eyes are in constant movement, we remain unaware of the high-speed stimulation produced by the retinal displacement. Vision is drastically reduced at the time of saccades. Here, I investigated whether the reduction of the unwanted disturbance could be established through a saccade-contingent habituation to intra-saccadic displacements. In more than 100 context trials, participants were exposed either to an intra-saccadic or to a post-saccadic disturbance or to no disturbance at all. After induction of a specific context, I measured peri-saccadic suppression. Displacement discrimination thresholds of observers were high after participants were exposed to an intra-saccadic disturbance. However, after exposure to a post-saccadic disturbance or a context without any intra-saccadic stimulation, displacement discrimination improved such that observers were able to see shifts as during fixation. Saccade-contingent habituation might explain why we do not perceive trans-saccadic retinal stimulation during saccades.

Data availability

All measured data have been deposited in OSF under DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/TZA7F.

The following data sets were generated

1. Eckart Zimmermann
(2019) Saccade suppression depends on context
Open Science Framework, TZA7F.

https://osf.io/tza7f/

Article and author information

Author details

Eckart Zimmermann

Institute for Experimental Psychology, University of Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

For correspondence
eckart.zimmermann@hhu.de

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-1964-2711

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (ZI/1456)

Eckart Zimmermann

H2020 European Research Council (757184)

Eckart Zimmermann

The funders supported the current study.

Ethics

Human subjects: The study was approved by the ethics committee of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf (ZI01-2019-01). Written informed consent about pseudonymized data collection, storage and publication was obtained prior to each experiment in accordance with the declaration of Helsinki.

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.