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Predictive remapping of attention across eye movements

Nature Neuroscience volume 14, pages 252–256 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

Many cells in retinotopic brain areas increase their activity when saccades (rapid eye movements) are about to bring stimuli into their receptive fields. Although previous work has attempted to look at the functional correlates of such predictive remapping, no study has explicitly tested for better attentional performance at the future retinal locations of attended targets. We found that, briefly before the eyes start moving, attention drawn to the targets of upcoming saccades also shifted to those retinal locations that the targets would cover once the eyes had moved, facilitating future movements. This suggests that presaccadic visual attention shifts serve to both improve presaccadic perceptual processing at the target locations and speed subsequent eye movements to their new postsaccadic locations. Predictive remapping of attention provides a sparse, efficient mechanism for keeping track of relevant parts of the scene when frequent rapid eye movements provoke retinal smear and temporal masking.

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Figure 1: Predictive remapping across eye movements.
Figure 2: Predictive remapping of attention in the double-step task.
Figure 3: Controlling for the spread of attention in the double-step task.
Figure 4: Controlling for cue-based facilitation in the double-step task.
Figure 5: Predictive remapping of attention to the fovea.

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Acknowledgements

We thank C. Buß for help with data acquisition. This work was supported by the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission (Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship 235625 awarded to M.R.), by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (GRK 1091, as a fellowship to D.J.) and by a Chaire d'Excellence grant to P.C.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Paris Descartes, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Paris, France

    Martin Rolfs & Patrick Cavanagh

  2. Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Martin Rolfs

  3. Department Psychologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, Germany

    Donatas Jonikaitis & Heiner Deubel

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  1. Martin Rolfs
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  2. Donatas Jonikaitis
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  3. Heiner Deubel
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  4. Patrick Cavanagh
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Contributions

M.R., D.J., H.D. and P.C. designed the experiments. M.R. and D.J. conducted the experiments and analyzed the data. M.R. and P.C. wrote the manuscript. P.C. and H.D. supervised the project. All of the authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Martin Rolfs or Patrick Cavanagh.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Rolfs, M., Jonikaitis, D., Deubel, H. et al. Predictive remapping of attention across eye movements. Nat Neurosci 14, 252–256 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2711

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