Pre-saccadic remapping relies on dynamics of spatial attention

Abstract

Each eye movement shifts the projections of the visual scene on the retina. It has been proposed that the receptive fields of neurons in oculomotor areas are remapped pre-saccadically to account for these shifts. While remapping of the whole visual scene seems prohibitively complex, selection by visual attention may limit these processes to a subset of attended locations. Because attentional selection consumes time, remapping of attended locations should evolve in time, too. In our study, we cued a spatial location by presenting an attention capturing cue at different times before a saccade and constructed detailed maps of attentional allocation across the visual field. We observed no remapping when the cue appeared shortly before saccade. In contrast, when the cue appeared sufficiently early before saccade, attentional resources were reallocated to the remapped location. Our results suggest that pre-saccadic remapping is an attentional process relying on the spatial and temporal dynamics of visual attention.