Elsevier

Vision Research

Volume 46, Issue 11, May 2006, Pages 1762-1776
Vision Research

Ultra-rapid object detection with saccadic eye movements: Visual processing speed revisited

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Abstract

Previous ultra-rapid go/no-go categorization studies with manual responses have demonstrated the remarkable speed and efficiency with which humans process natural scenes. Using a forced-choice saccade task we show here that when two scenes are simultaneously flashed in the left and right hemifields, human participants can reliably make saccades to the side containing an animal in as little as 120 ms. Low level differences between target and distractor images were unable to account for these exceptionally fast responses. The results suggest a very fast and unexpected route linking visual processing in the ventral stream with the programming of saccadic eye movements.

Keywords

Early visual processing
Eye movements
Natural images
Visual pathways
Event-related potentials

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Statement: We declare that the work presented here has not been published elsewhere and is not under review with another journal. If published in Vision Research it will not be reprinted elsewhere in any language in the same form without the consent of the publisher, who holds the copyright.