title: A "blanking effect" for surface features: Transsaccadic spatial-frequency discrimination is improved by postsaccadic blanking.
abstract: Although saccadic eye movements occur frequently—about three or four times a second—humans are astonishingly blind to transsaccadic changes. Locational displacements of the saccade target of up to 2 deg of visual angle, and even large changes of a visual scene, can go unnoticed. For a long time, this insensitivity was ascribed to deficits in transsaccadic memory: Only a coarse, (spatially) imprecise representation would be retained across a saccade. This assumption was contradicted by Deubel's and Schneider's (Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17:259-260, 1994) striking finding that locational discrimination performance across a saccade is greatly improved by inserting a short postsaccadic blank. Surprisingly, the question of whether blanking effects occur also for other forms of transsaccadic changes (i.e., surface-feature changes) has been widely ignored. We tested this question by means of a transsaccadic change in spatial frequency. Postsaccadic blanking facilitated spatial-frequency discrimination, but to a smaller amount than the usual blanking effects obtained with locational displacements. This finding bears important implications for models of visual stability and transsaccadic memory.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany, katharina.weiss@uni-bielefeld.de.
authors.forename: Katharina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Weiß
authors.forename: Werner X
authors.initials: WX
authors.lastname: Schneider
authors.forename: Arvid
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Herwig
mesh_terms: D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D010470:Perceptual Masking / Q000502:physiology; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology*; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology