title: Suppression of Face Perception during Saccadic Eye Movements.
abstract: Lack of awareness of a stimulus briefly presented during saccadic eye movement is known as saccadic omission. Studying the reduced visibility of visual stimuli around the time of saccade-known as saccadic suppression-is a key step to investigate saccadic omission. To date, almost all studies have been focused on the reduced visibility of simple stimuli such as flashes and bars. The extension of the results from simple stimuli to more complex objects has been neglected. In two experimental tasks, we measured the subjective and objective awareness of a briefly presented face stimuli during saccadic eye movement. In the first task, we measured the subjective awareness of the visual stimuli and showed that in most of the trials there is no conscious awareness of the faces. In the second task, we measured objective sensitivity in a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) face detection task, which demonstrated chance-level performance. Here, we provide the first evidence of complete suppression of complex visual stimuli during the saccadic eye movement.
authors.affiliation: Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, Tilburg University, 5037 AB Tilburg, The Netherlands ; Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, 6229 EV Maastricht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Mehrdad
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Seirafi
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, 6229 EV Maastricht, The Netherlands ; Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6500 GL Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: De Weerd
authors.affiliation: Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, Tilburg University, 5037 AB Tilburg, The Netherlands ; Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, 6229 EV Maastricht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Beatrice
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: de Gelder