title: Attentional trade-offs maintain the tracking of moving objects across saccades.
abstract: In many situations like playing sports or driving a car, we keep track of moving objects, despite the frequent eye movements that drastically interrupt their retinal motion trajectory. Here we report evidence that transsaccadic tracking relies on trade-offs of attentional resources from a tracked object's motion path to its remapped location. While participants covertly tracked a moving object, we presented pulses of coherent motion at different locations to probe the allocation of spatial attention along the object's entire motion path. Changes in the sensitivity for these pulses showed that during fixation attention shifted smoothly in anticipation of the tracked object's displacement. However, just before a saccade, attentional resources were withdrawn from the object's current motion path and reflexively drawn to the retinal location the object would have after saccade. This finding demonstrates the predictive choice the visual system makes to maintain the tracking of moving objects across saccades.
authors.affiliation: Allgemeine und Experimentelle Psychologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany; martin.szinte@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Szinte
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, New York;
authors.forename: Marisa
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Carrasco
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Unité Mixte de Recherche 8242, Paris, France; and.
authors.forename: Patrick
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Cavanagh
authors.affiliation: Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience and Department of Psychology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rolfs
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology*; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: attention; remapping; saccades; tracking