Dataset Information

Transsaccadic perception is affected by saccade landing point deviations after saccadic adaptation.

ABSTRACT: Whenever we move our eyes, some visual information obtained before a saccade is combined with the visual information obtained after a saccade. Interestingly, saccades rarely land exactly on the saccade target, which may pose a problem for transsaccadic perception as it could affect the quality of postsaccadic input. Recently, however, we showed that transsaccadic feature integration is actually unaffected by deviations of saccade landing points. Possibly, transsaccadic integration remains unaffected because the presaccadic shift of attention follows the intended saccade target and not the actual saccade landing point during regular saccades. Here, we investigated whether saccade landing point errors can in fact alter transsaccadic perception when the presaccadic shift of attention follows the saccade landing point deviation. Given that saccadic adaptation not only changes the saccade vector, but also the presaccadic shift of attention, we combined a feature report paradigm with saccadic adaptation. Observers reported the color of the saccade target, which occasionally changed slightly during a saccade to the target. This task was performed before and after saccadic adaptation. The results showed that, after adaptation, presaccadic color information became less precise and transsaccadic perception had a stronger reliance on the postsaccadic color estimate. Therefore, although previous studies have shown that transsaccadic perception is generally unaffected by saccade landing point deviations, our results reveal that this cannot be considered a general property of the visual system. When presaccadic shifts of attention follow altered saccade landing points, transsaccadic perception is affected, suggesting that transsaccadic feature perception might be dependent on visual spatial attention.

SUBMITTER: Van der Stigchel S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7488614 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Transsaccadic perception is affected by saccade landing point deviations after saccadic adaptation.

Van der Stigchel Stefan S Schut Martijn J MJ Fabius Jasper J Van der Stoep Nathan N

Journal of vision 20200901 9

Whenever we move our eyes, some visual information obtained before a saccade is combined with the visual information obtained after a saccade. Interestingly, saccades rarely land exactly on the saccade target, which may pose a problem for transsaccadic perception as it could affect the quality of postsaccadic input. Recently, however, we showed that transsaccadic feature integration is actually unaffected by deviations of saccade landing points. Possibly, transsaccadic integration remains unaffe ...[more]

PMID: 32915955

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Project description:Saccadic eye movements enable us to rapidly direct our high-resolution fovea onto relevant parts of the visual world. However, while we can intentionally select a location as a saccade target, the wider visual scene also influences our executed movements. In the presence of multiple objects, eye movements may be "captured" to the location of a distractor object, or be biased toward the intermediate position between objects (the "global effect"). Here we examined how the relative strengths of the global effect and visual object capture changed with saccade latency, the separation between visual items and stimulus contrast. Importantly, while many previous studies have omitted giving observers explicit instructions, we instructed participants to either saccade to a specified target object or to the midpoint between two stimuli. This allowed us to examine how their explicit movement goal influenced the likelihood that their saccades terminated at either the target, distractor, or intermediate locations. Using a probabilistic mixture model, we found evidence that both visual object capture and the global effect co-occurred at short latencies and declined as latency increased. As object separation increased, capture came to dominate the landing positions of fast saccades, with reduced global effect. Using the mixture model fits, we dissociated the proportion of unavoidably captured saccades to each location from those intentionally directed to the task goal. From this we could extract the time course of competition between automatic capture and intentional targeting. We show that task instructions substantially altered the distribution of saccade landing points, even at the shortest latencies.NEW & NOTEWORTHY When making an eye movement to a target location, the presence of a nearby distractor can cause the saccade to unintentionally terminate at the distractor itself or the average position in between stimuli. With probabilistic mixture models, we quantified how both unavoidable capture and goal-directed targeting were influenced by changing the task and the target-distractor separation. Using this novel technique, we could extract the time course over which automatic and intentional processes compete for control of saccades.

Project description:Plasticity in the oculomotor system ensures that saccadic eye movements reliably meet their visual goals-to bring regions of interest into foveal, high-acuity vision. Here, we present a comprehensive description of sensorimotor learning in saccades. We induced continuous adaptation of saccade amplitudes using a double-step paradigm, in which participants saccade to a peripheral target stimulus, which then undergoes a surreptitious, intra-saccadic shift (ISS) as the eyes are in flight. In our experiments, the ISS followed a systematic variation, increasing or decreasing from one saccade to the next as a sinusoidal function of the trial number. Over a large range of frequencies, we confirm that adaptation gain shows (1) a periodic response, reflecting the frequency of the ISS with a delay of a number of trials, and (2) a simultaneous drift towards lower saccade gains. We then show that state-space-based linear time-invariant systems (LTIS) represent suitable generative models for this evolution of saccade gain over time. This state-equation algorithm computes the prediction of an internal (or hidden state-) variable by learning from recent feedback errors, and it can be compared to experimentally observed adaptation gain. The algorithm also includes a forgetting rate that quantifies per-trial leaks in the adaptation gain, as well as a systematic, non-error-based bias. Finally, we study how the parameters of the generative models depend on features of the ISS. Driven by a sinusoidal disturbance, the state-equation admits an exact analytical solution that expresses the parameters of the phenomenological description as functions of those of the generative model. Together with statistical model selection criteria, we use these correspondences to characterize and refine the structure of compatible state-equation models. We discuss the relation of these findings to established results and suggest that they may guide further design of experimental research across domains of sensorimotor adaptation.

Dataset Information

Transsaccadic perception is affected by saccade landing point deviations after saccadic adaptation.

Publications

Transsaccadic perception is affected by saccade landing point deviations after saccadic adaptation.

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