Trends in Cognitive Sciences
OpinionTrans-saccadic perception
Section snippets
The problem of trans-saccadic perception
Real-world perception is fundamentally trans-saccadic. Most complex activities, such as conversing face-to-face, walking down a busy street or reading the newspaper require a series of eye fixations separated by ballistic eye movements known as saccades. The temporally and spatially discontinuous nature of visual sensory input creates a series of incredible challenges for visual cognition. It is crucial, for example, to keep track of the location of attended objects across saccades to maintain
Principle 1: the dynamic receptive field
In the case of visual processing, it has been assumed that receptive fields are constant, both in terms of stimulus and spatial selectivity, and that any particular neuron can be defined based on the retinal location and visual properties of its preferred stimulus. This supposedly fixed architecture, however, has turned out to be surprisingly flexible. As first described in the lateral intraparietal area LIP of the cortex, most neurons have access to information outside the classical receptive
Principle 2: the role of prediction
The second principle is that successful combination of information from separate glances depends upon the ability to anticipate the outcome of a saccade. As stated earlier, remapping can begin before the onset of the saccade. Several studies have shown that perception can also be influenced by the intention to make a saccade (for reviews, see Refs 42, 43). Recent evidence for perceptual consequences of predictive remapping comes from a study of adaptation aftereffects [44]. It was found that
Principle 3: intermediate processing stages
The third principle that might help us to understand trans-saccadic perception is that vision involves a series of separate processing stages. In the simple case of recognizing an object, for example, visual information is processed through numerous levels in the hierarchy from primary visual cortex (V1) to object-recognition areas in temporal cortex. These intermediate stages allow the mind to move from a pixel-like, pictorial representation of the world – akin to a photograph in retinal
Principle 4: graded effects of saccades on intermediate visual representations
The fourth basic principle is that, as one moves further along the hierarchy, visual processing becomes progressively more influenced by remapping. Initial evidence for this graded transformation from more static to more dynamic representations comes from both single cell recordings in the visual cortex of macaque monkeys [18] and from functional imaging studies [59] (Figure 4). Studies in both species reveal substantial remapping at intermediate levels (V3 and V3A) and much less at lower
Principle 5: the etcetera principle
A key observation is that only salient stimuli are updated – stable, unattended stimuli do not activate the remapping process [60]. Likewise, the perceptual correlates of remapping (as measured by adaptation aftereffects) are limited to the most salient objects in a display [61] and trans-saccadic visual memory is thought to contain only 3–4 attended items [31]. What happens to the rest of the scene?
The influential art historian Ernst Gombrich [62] used the ‘etcetera principle’ to describe our
Conclusions
Here, we have described five principles underlying the perception of objects across saccades. According to our framework, perception across separate glances is mediated by a predictive, saccade-specific mechanism that remaps visual information as part of the updating of spatial location. This updating process begins during the time period between the intention to make a saccade and the onset of the eye movement itself and is instantiated by dynamic receptive fields in parietal, frontal and
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