Trends in Neurosciences
ReviewTo look or not to look: dissociating presaccadic and covert spatial attention
Section snippets
Presaccadic and covert attention are dissociable
Much of human visual experience results from moving our gaze to actively explore the visual world and gather information. By scanning the scene with saccadic eye movements (see Glossary), we bring relevant objects into our fovea, where visual information is processed with high precision. The link between eye movements and visual perception is so tight that perception is already facilitated before our gaze has reached a location of interest: immediately before an eye movement, while we prepare
Linking saccadic eye movements and visual attention
Over the past three decades, different groups have found that perceptual judgments immediately before eye movement onset are more accurate for stimuli presented at the saccade target (the upcoming eye fixation) than elsewhere [5., 6., 7.]. Interest in the perceptual consequences of presaccadic attention has continuously increased, and numerous studies have explored its spatial and temporal properties using variations of a typical dual-task protocol (Table 1).
Spatial and temporal coupling of oculomotor planning and attentional orienting
By testing performance at different
Modulations of visual representations by presaccadic attention and covert attention
The vast majority of presaccadic attention research has focused on its effects on performance (e.g., accuracy in discrimination tasks). We discuss here recent advances that go beyond mere performance measures and reveal how presaccadic attention modulates featural representations – in other words the processing of visual features, including orientation, spatial frequency, and contrast. This assessment enables a differentiation of the cognitive, neural, and computational processes underlying
Common brain areas but distinct subpopulations
The tight coupling between eye movements and attentional orienting raises the question of whether presaccadic and covert spatial attention are based on the same neural processes. At a broad scale, the brain structures that are active during saccadic eye movements [the frontal eye fields (FEF), the precentral sulcus, and the superior colliculus (SC)] are also selectively modulated during covert attention tasks in human- and non-human primates [100., 101., 102., 103.]. Feedback signals projecting
Concluding remarks
Although both presaccadic attention and covert spatial attention enable selective processing of visual information and facilitate perception, there are clear dissociations in their temporal dynamics, modulations of featural representation of basic visual dimensions, neural computations, and neural correlates. Although questions remain about the specific origin, nature, and functional significance of presaccadic attention and covert attention, converging evidence indicates that the notion that
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by National Institutes of Health National Eye Institute grant R01 EY019693 to M.C. and a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to N.M.H. We thank Antoine Barbot, Antonio Fernández, Marc Himmelberg, Michael Jigo, and other members of the laboratory of M.C., as well as Luca Wollenberg and Heiner Deubel, for useful comments.
Declaration of interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Glossary
- Adaptation
- reduced sensory responses to prolonged or repeated presentations of the same stimulus. In psychophysical experiments, visual performance for a test stimulus following an adaptor stimulus is lower when the stimuli share similar features (e.g., orientation).
- Antisaccade task
- participants are required to suppress a reflexive saccade to a salient visual stimulus and instead perform a voluntary saccade in the opposite direction.
- Fovea
- a depression in the inner retinal surface, ~1.5 mm in
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These authors contributed equally