Abstract
Humans actively sample their environment with saccadic eye movements to bring relevant information into high-acuity foveal vision. Despite being lower in resolution, peripheral information is also available before each saccade. How the pre-saccadic extrafoveal preview of a visual object influences its post-saccadic processing is still an unanswered question. The current study investigated this question by simultaneously recording behavior and fixation-related brain potentials while human subjects made saccades to face stimuli. We manipulated the relationship between pre-saccadic “previews” and post-saccadic images to explicitly isolate the influences of the former. Subjects performed a gender discrimination task on a newly foveated face under three preview conditions: scrambled face, incongruent face (different identity from the foveated face), and congruent face (same identity). As expected, reaction times were faster after a congruent-face preview compared with a scrambled-face preview. Importantly, intact face previews (either incongruent or congruent) resulted in a massive reduction of post-saccadic neural responses. Specifically, we analyzed the classic face-selective N170 component at occipitotemporal electroencephalogram electrodes, which was still present in our experiments with active looking. However, the post-saccadic N170 was strongly attenuated following intact-face previews compared with the scrambled condition. This large and long-lasting decrease in evoked activity is consistent with a trans-saccadic mechanism of prediction that influences category-specific neural processing at the start of a new fixation. These findings constrain theories of visual stability and show that the extrafoveal preview methodology can be a useful tool to investigate its underlying mechanisms.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 2305-2313 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Journal of Neuroscience |
Volume | 40 |
Issue number | 10 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 11 2020 |
Keywords
- Active prediction
- Eye movements
- Fixation related potentials
- N170
- Visual stability
- Cues
- Fixation, Ocular/physiology
- Humans
- Color
- Occipital Lobe/physiology
- Male
- Reaction Time
- Electroencephalography
- Temporal Lobe/physiology
- Young Adult
- Gender Identity
- Evoked Potentials, Visual/physiology
- Adult
- Female
- Saccades/physiology
- Psychomotor Performance/physiology
- Facial Recognition/physiology
- Event-Related Potentials, P300/physiology
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Neuroscience(all)