Perceptual restoration fails to recover unconscious processing for smooth eye movements after occipital stroke

Abstract
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Abstract

The visual pathways that guide actions do not necessarily mediate conscious perception. Patients with primary visual cortex (V1) damage lose conscious perception but often retain unconscious abilities (e.g. blindsight). Here, we asked if saccade accuracy and post-saccadic following responses (PFRs) that automatically track target motion upon saccade landing are retained when conscious perception is lost. We contrasted these behaviors in the blind and intact fields of 11 chronic V1-stroke patients, and in 8 visually-intact controls. Saccade accuracy was relatively normal in all cases. Stroke patients also had normal PFR in their intact fields, but no PFR in their blind fields. Thus, V1 damage did not spare the unconscious visual processing necessary for automatic, post-saccadic smooth eye movements. Importantly, visual training that recovered motion perception in the blind field did not restore the PFR, suggesting a clear dissociation between pathways mediating perceptual restoration and automatic actions in the V1-damaged visual system.

Data availability

Data for all figures has been shared on the Dryad.https://doi.org/10.6078/D1W69T

The following data sets were generated

(2021) Data from: Perceptual restoration fails to recover unconscious processing for smooth eye movements after occipital strokes
Dryad Digital Repository, doi.org/10.6078/dryad.D1W69T.

https://dx.doi.org/10.6078/dryad.D1W69T

Article and author information

Author details

Sunwoo Kwon

Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry and Vision Science, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Berkeley K Fahrenthold

Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Matthew R Cavanaugh

Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, United States

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Krystel R Huxlin

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, United States

Competing interests
Krystel R Huxlin, co-inventor on US Patent No. 7,549,743.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-7138-6156
Jude F Mitchell

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, United States

For correspondence
jmitch27@ur.rochester.edu

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-0197-7545

Funding

National Eye Institute (EY027314)

Krystel R Huxlin

National Eye Institute (EY021209)

Krystel R Huxlin

National Eye Institute (EY030998)

Jude F Mitchell

Research to Prevent Blindness

Krystel R Huxlin

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: Human subjects: All experimental protocols were conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by The Research Subjects Review Board at the University of Rochester Medical Center (#00021951). Informed written consent was obtained from all participants prior to participation. Participants were compensated $15/hour.

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.