title: Pre-saccadic shifts of visual attention.
abstract: The locations of visual objects to which we attend are initially mapped in a retinotopic frame of reference. Because each saccade results in a shift of images on the retina, however, the retinotopic mapping of spatial attention must be updated around the time of each eye movement. Mathôt and Theeuwes [1] recently demonstrated that a visual cue draws attention not only to the cue's current retinotopic location, but also to a location shifted in the direction of the saccade, the "future-field". Here we asked whether retinotopic and future-field locations have special status, or whether cue-related attention benefits exist between these locations. We measured responses to targets that appeared either at the retinotopic or future-field location of a brief, non-predictive visual cue, or at various intermediate locations between them. Attentional cues facilitated performance at both the retinotopic and future-field locations for cued relative to uncued targets, as expected. Critically, this cueing effect also occurred at intermediate locations. Our results, and those reported previously [1], imply a systematic bias of attention in the direction of the saccade, independent of any predictive remapping of attention that compensates for retinal displacements of objects across saccades [2].
authors.affiliation: The School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland, Australia. willjharri@gmail.com
authors.forename: William J
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: Harrison
authors.forename: Jason B
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Mattingley
authors.forename: Roger W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Remington
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D012438:Saccades; D014785:Vision, Ocular; D055815:Young Adult