title: Visual attention is available at a task-relevant location rapidly after a saccade.
abstract: Maintaining attention at a task-relevant spatial location while making eye-movements necessitates a rapid, saccade-synchronized shift of attentional modulation from the neuronal population representing the task-relevant location before the saccade to the one representing it after the saccade. Currently, the precise time at which spatial attention becomes fully allocated to the task-relevant location after the saccade remains unclear. Using a fine-grained temporal analysis of human peri-saccadic detection performance in an attention task, we show that spatial attention is fully available at the task-relevant location within 30 milliseconds after the saccade. Subjects tracked the attentional target veridically throughout our task: i.e. they almost never responded to non-target stimuli. Spatial attention and saccadic processing therefore co-ordinate well to ensure that relevant locations are attentionally enhanced soon after the beginning of each eye fixation.
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center, Goettingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Tao
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-2060-690X
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Yao
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center, Goettingen, Germany.|European Neuroscience Institute, Goettingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Madhura
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ketkar
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center, Goettingen, Germany.|Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Goettingen, Germany.|Faculty of Biology and Psychology, Goettingen University, Goettingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Treue
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center, Goettingen, Germany.
authors.forename: B Suresh
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-0383-054X
authors.initials: BS
authors.lastname: Krishna
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology*; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: attention; human; neuroscience; saccade; vision