RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 No Perisaccadic Mislocalization with Abruptly Cancelled Saccades
JF The Journal of Neuroscience
JO J. Neurosci.
FD Society for Neuroscience
SP 5497
OP 5504
DO 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4773-13.2014
VO 34
IS 16
A1 Atsma, Jeroen
A1 Maij, Femke
A1 Corneil, Brian D.
A1 Medendorp, W. Pieter
YR 2014
UL http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/16/5497.abstract
AB Every saccadic eye movement that we make changes the image of the world on our retina. Yet, despite these retinal shifts, we still perceive our visual world to be stable. Efference copy from the oculomotor system to the visual system has been suggested to contribute to this stable percept, enabling the brain to anticipate the retinal image shifts by remapping the neural image. A psychophysical phenomenon that has been linked to this predictive remapping is the mislocalization of a stimulus flashed around the time of a saccade. If this mislocalization is initiated by saccade preparation, one should also observe localization errors when a saccade is planned, but abruptly aborted just before its execution. We tested this hypothesis in human subjects using a novel paradigm that combines a flash localization task with a countermanding component that occasionally requires saccade cancellation. Surprisingly, we found no trace of mislocalization, even for saccades cancelled close to the point of no return. This strongly suggests that the actual execution of the saccade is a prerequisite for the typical localization errors, which rejects various models and constrains neural substrates. We conclude that perisaccadic mislocalization is not a direct consequence of saccade preparation, but arises after saccade execution when the flash location is constructed from memory.