Transsaccadic memory: Building a stable world from glance to glance

During natural viewing, the eye samples the visual environment using a series of jerking, saccadic eye movements, separated by periods of fixation. This raises the fundamental question of how information from separate fixations is integrated into a single, coherent percept. The chapter discusses two mechanisms that may be involved in generating the stable and continuous perception of the world. First, information about attended objects may be integrated across separate glances. To evaluate this possibility, it presents and discusses data showing the transsaccadic temporal integration of motion and form. The chapter also focuses on the potential role of the re-mapping of receptive fields around the time of saccades in transsaccadic integration and in the phenomenon of saccadic mislocalization. Second, information about multiple objects in a natural scene is built up across separate glances into a coherent representation of the environment. Experiments with naturalistic stimuli show that scene memory builds up across separate glances in working memory. The combination of saccadic re-mapping, occurring on a timescale of milliseconds, and a medium-term scene memory, operating over a span of several minutes, may underlie the subjective impression of a stable visual world.