Learning to silence saccadic suppression

Abstract

Perceptual stability is facilitated by a decrease in visual sensitivity during rapid eye movements, called saccadic suppression. While a large body of evidence demonstrates that saccadic programming is plastic, little is known about whether the perceptual consequences of saccades can be modified. Here, we demonstrate that saccadic suppression is attenuated during learning on a standard visual detection-in-noise task, to the point that it is effectively silenced. Across a period of 7 days, 44 participants were trained to detect brief, low-contrast stimuli embedded within dynamic noise, while eye position was tracked. Although instructed to fixate, participants regularly made small fixational saccades. Data were accumulated over a large number of trials, allowing us to assess changes in performance as a function of the temporal proximity of stimuli and saccades. This analysis revealed that improvements in sensitivity over the training period were accompanied by a systematic change in the impact of saccades on performance—robust saccadic suppression on day 1 declined gradually over subsequent days until its magnitude became indistinguishable from zero. This silencing of suppression was not explained by learning-related changes in saccade characteristics and generalized to an untrained retinal location and stimulus orientation. Suppression was restored when learned stimulus timing was perturbed, consistent with the operation of a mechanism that temporarily reduces or eliminates saccadic suppression, but only when it is behaviorally advantageous to do so. Our results indicate that learning can circumvent saccadic suppression to improve performance, without compromising its functional benefits in other viewing contexts.

Coupling perception to action through incidental sensory consequences of motor behaviour

“…Thus, visual information that is not consciously accessible during a saccade is not discarded pre-emptively and could be exploited. For example, saccadic suppression associated with microsaccades 104 is reduced when stimuli are presented predictably during saccade execution (Fig. 2d), suggesting that task demands might override saccadic suppression with training 104 .…”

“…For example, saccadic suppression associated with microsaccades 104 is reduced when stimuli are presented predictably during saccade execution (Fig. 2d), suggesting that task demands might override saccadic suppression with training 104 . Suppression could also dissipate if saccade-induced sensory consequences (such as incidental retinal motion) are reliably absent, such that their dedicated suppression becomes irrelevant 103 .…”

Motor-related signals support localization invariance for stable visual perception

“…Indeed, experimental work has shown that even as early as in the V1 "eye tracker" information can be extracted from neural signals to accurately reconstruct the direction and gaze and, therefore, the location of objects in a craniocentric reference frame [64]. Further, psychophysical experiments have confirmed that visual information is not gated away at PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY specific layers in visual streams but remains available to perceptually relevant visual circuits, for example, permitting learning-mediated improvements of perceptual judgements during saccades [102,115].…”

Resolving visual motion through perceptual gaps

“…However, sensory input inhibition is incomplete. With training, suppression can be dampened if stimulus presentation during a saccade is task relevant [133,134]. Indeed, moving task-relevant stimuli during saccade flight can be detected and used to support post-saccadic gaze correction [135].…”