Rapid visual stability for action
Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology
Final Report Abstract
The human retina is highly inhomogeneous with a small central visual field with high accuracy and a large peripheral field with low spatial resolution. To efficiently collect information from the surroundings, visual attention selects certain parts of the visual scene as targets, which is followed by saccadic eye movements to these objects. This sequence of covert and overt selection occurs several times per second and is a crucial mechanism that enables us to process information from a number of locations in the external world. However, this strategy also faces potentially serious problems. A major problem results from the fact that, across the saccade, the object positions shift on the retina, causing a large change in the retinal image which leads to the challenge to integrate the images before and after the saccade. How the visual system achieves the perception of a stable and consistent visual world across a saccade despite these displacements, and how attentional, oculomotor, and memory processes interact across saccades are therefore essential questions in visual science. Our collaborative ORA project aimed at elucidating the role of these components and their interaction in transsaccadic information processing. The research was organized in three major research lines. The first and major research line concerned the nature and quality of the visual representations transferred across the saccade, and whether these representations are retinotopic or spatiotopic. Our studies demonstrate that detailed form information is transferred across eye movements, and that the transferred memory trace operates in spatiotopic coordinates and depends on the execution of a saccade. They further support the view that this form of transsaccadic memory precedes working memory and generates a phantom-like percept, which, when made accessible by our blanking manipulation, improves the detection of visual changes that occur across the saccade. The second research line investigated whether limitations in the oculomotor range (i.e., to locations that can be reached by the eye) also directly limit the range of visual space that we can attend, as previously proposed. Our results clearly demonstrate that attention can indeed shift to locations the eyes cannot reach, in other words, visual attention is not bound to the oculomotor range. Finally, the third research line expanded our studies to include hand movements, showing that the attentional selection mechanisms for eye and hand movement targets are separate and independent, while both selection processes strongly limit the capability to voluntarily attend to non-motor targets. The data reveal that voluntary attentional control is extremely fragile and dominated by automatic, premotor shifts of attention. Thus, it seems that action-driven selection disrupts voluntary attention and plays a dominant role for visual selection.
Publications
- (2019). Visual attention is not limited to the oculomotor range. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 116, 9665–9670
Hanning, N.M., Szinte, M., & Deubel, H.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1813465116) - (2020). Attention capture outside the oculomotor range. Current Biology 30, R1363-R1360
Hanning, N. M. & Deubel, H.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.09.054) - (2020). Displacement detection is suppressed by the post-saccadic stimulus. Scientific Reports
Takano, S., Matsumiya, K., Tseng, C., Kuriki, I., Deubel, H., & Shioiri,S.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-66216-1) - (2020). Eye and hand movements disrupt attentional control. bioRxiv
Hanning, N.M., Wollenberg, L., Jonikaitis, D., & Deubel, H.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.22.309237) - (2020). Spatiotopic and saccade-specific transsaccadic memory for object detail. Journal of Vision, 20(7):2, 1–12
Grzeczkowski , L., van Leeuwen, L, Belopolski, A.V., & Deubel, H.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.20.7.2) - (2020). Stimulus blanking reveals contrast-dependent transsaccadic feature transfer. Scientific Reports
Grzeczkowski , L., Deubel, H., & Szinte, M.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-75717-y)
