Attention doesn't slide: spatiotopic updating after eye movements instantiates a new, discrete attentional locus.
During natural vision, eye movements can drastically alter the retinotopic (eye-centered) coordinates of locations and objects, yet the spatiotopic (world-centered) percept remains stable. Maintaining visuospatial attention in spatiotopic coordinates requires updating of attentional representations following each eye movement. However, this updating is not instantaneous; attentional facilitation temporarily lingers at the previous retinotopic location after a saccade, a phenomenon known as the retinotopic attentional trace. At various times after a saccade, we probed attention at an intermediate location between the retinotopic and spatiotopic locations to determine whether a single locus of attentional facilitation slides progressively from the previous retinotopic location to the appropriate spatiotopic location, or whether retinotopic facilitation decays while a new, independent spatiotopic locus concurrently becomes active. Facilitation at the intermediate location was not significant at any time, suggesting that top-down attention can result in enhancement of discrete retinotopic and spatiotopic locations without passing through intermediate locations.
Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. jgolomb@mit.edu
Julie D
JD
Golomb
Alexandria C
AC
Marino
Marvin M
MM
Chun
James A
JA
Mazer
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000502:physiology; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology*; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011601:Psychophysics; D012160:Retina / Q000502:physiology*; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology*; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
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