Stimulus blanking reveals transsaccadic feature transfer

Across saccadic eye movements, the visual system receives two successive static images corresponding to the pre- and the postsaccadic projections of the visual field on the retina. The existence of a mechanism integrating the content of these images is today still a matter of debate. Here, we studied the transfer of a visual feature across saccades using a blanking paradigm. Participants moved their eyes to a peripheral grating and discriminated a change in its orientation occurring during the eye movement. The grating was either constantly on the screen or briefly blanked during and after the saccade. Moreover, it either was of the same luminance as the background (i.e., isoluminant) or anisoluminant with respect to it. We found that for anisoluminant grating, the orientation discrimination across saccade was improved when a blank followed the onset of the eye movement. Such effect was however abolished with isoluminant grating. Additionally, performance was also improved when an anisoluminant grating presented before the saccade was followed by an isoluminant one. These results demonstrate that a detailed representation of the presaccadic image was transferred across saccades allowing participants to perform better on the trans-saccadic orientation task. While such a transfer of visual orientation across saccade is masked in real-life anisoluminant conditions, the use of a blank and of isoluminant postsaccadic grating allowed here to reveal its existence. Significance statement Static objects are perceived as not moving across eye movements despite their visual projection shifts on our retina. To compensate for such shifts and create a continuous perception of space, our brain may keep track of objects’ visual features across our movements. We found that shortly blanking a contrast-defined object during and after saccades allows to recover a detailed representation of its orientation. We propose that the transfer of visual content across saccades revealed with the use of a simple blank plays an important role in ensuring our continuous and stable perception of the world.