Optimal and Suboptimal Use of Postsaccadic Vision in Sequences of Saccades

Saccades are imprecise, due to sensory and motor noise. To avoid an accumulation of errors during sequences of saccades, a prediction derived from the efference copy can be combined with the reafferent visual feedback to adjust the following eye movement. By varying the information quantity of the visual feedback, we investigated how the reliability of the visual information affects the postsaccadic update in humans. Two elements of the visual scene were manipulated, the saccade target or the background, presented either together or in isolation. We determined the weight of the postsaccadic visual information by measuring the effect of intrasaccadic visual shifts on the following saccade. We confirmed that the weight of visual information evolves with information quantity as predicted for a statistically optimal system. In particular, we found that the visual background alone can guide the postsaccadic update, and that information from target and background are optimally combined. Moreover, these visual weights are adjusted dynamically and on a trial-to-trial basis to the level of visual noise determined by target eccentricity and reaction time. In contrast, we uncovered a dissociation between the visual signals used to update the next planned saccade (main saccade) and those used to generate an involuntary corrective saccade. The latter was exclusively based on visual information about the target, and discarded all information about the background: a suboptimal use of visual evidence.