TY - JOUR
T1 - Post-saccadic face processing is modulated by pre-saccadic preview
T2 - Evidence from fixation-related potentials
AU - Buonocore, Antimo
AU - Dimigen, Olaf
AU - Melcher, David
N1 - Funding Information:
Received April 16, 2019; revised Jan. 8, 2020; accepted Jan. 9, 2020. Author contributions: A.B., O.D., and D.M. designed research; A.B. performed research; A.B. and O.D. analyzed data; A.B., O.D., and D.M. wrote the paper. This work was supported by a Grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (R21MH117787) to D.M. The authors declare no competing financial interests. *A.B. and O.D. contributed equally to this work. Correspondence should be addressed to Antimo Buonocore at antimo.buonocore@cin.uni-tuebingen.de. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0861-19.2020 Copyright © 2020 the authors
PY - 2020/3/11
Y1 - 2020/3/11
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Active prediction
KW - Eye movements
KW - Fixation related potentials
KW - N170
KW - Visual stability
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U2 - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0861-19.2020
DO - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0861-19.2020
M3 - Article
C2 - 32001610
AN - SCOPUS:85081736192
VL - 40
SP - 2305
EP - 2313
JO - Journal of Neuroscience
JF - Journal of Neuroscience
SN - 0270-6474
IS - 10
ER -