Time course of spatiotopic updating across saccades

Significance Humans make frequent eye movements—about three to four times per second. Eye movements create changes in sensory input that the visual system should dissociate from changes in the outside world. Still, visual perception is introspectively undisrupted, but appears continuous. It has been hypothesized that the visual system anticipates the sensory changes based on a predictive signal from the oculomotor system. However, psychophysical studies suggested that this anticipation develops slowly: too slow for natural vision. Here, we examined the speed of this anticipation more closely using psychophysics and a motion illusion. We observed fast anticipatory updating, quantifiable in human behavior. The time scale at which the anticipation is reflected in behavior is compatible with typical fixation durations in natural viewing. Humans move their eyes several times per second, yet we perceive the outside world as continuous despite the sudden disruptions created by each eye movement. To date, the mechanism that the brain employs to achieve visual continuity across eye movements remains unclear. While it has been proposed that the oculomotor system quickly updates and informs the visual system about the upcoming eye movement, behavioral studies investigating the time course of this updating suggest the involvement of a slow mechanism, estimated to take more than 500 ms to operate effectively. This is a surprisingly slow estimate, because both the visual system and the oculomotor system process information faster. If spatiotopic updating is indeed this slow, it cannot contribute to perceptual continuity, because it is outside the temporal regime of typical oculomotor behavior. Here, we argue that the behavioral paradigms that have been used previously are suboptimal to measure the speed of spatiotopic updating. In this study, we used a fast gaze-contingent paradigm, using high phi as a continuous stimulus across eye movements. We observed fast spatiotopic updating within 150 ms after stimulus onset. The results suggest the involvement of a fast updating mechanism that predictively influences visual perception after an eye movement. The temporal characteristics of this mechanism are compatible with the rate at which saccadic eye movements are typically observed in natural viewing.

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