Post-saccadic changes disrupt attended pre-saccadic object memory

Abstract

Trans-saccadic memory consists of keeping track of objects' locations and features across saccades; pre-saccadic information is remembered and compared with post-saccadic information. It has been shown to have limited resources and involve attention with respect to the selection of objects and features. In support, a previous study showed that recognition of distinct post-saccadic objects in the visual scene is impaired when pre-saccadic objects are relevant and thus already encoded in memory (Poth, Herwig, Schneider, 2015). Here, we investigated the inverse (i.e. how the memory of pre-saccadic objects is affected by abrupt but irrelevant changes in the post-saccadic visual scene). We also modulated the amount of attention to the relevant pre-saccadic object by having participants either make a saccade to it or elsewhere and observed that pre-saccadic attentional facilitation affected how much post-saccadic changes disrupted trans-saccadic memory of pre-saccadic objects.Participants identified a flashed symbol (d, b, p, or q, among distracters), at one of six placeholders (figures "8") arranged in circle around fixation while planning a saccade to one of them. They reported the identity of the symbol after the saccade. We changed the post-saccadic scene in Experiment one by removing the entire scene, only the placeholder where the pre-saccadic symbol was presented, or all other placeholders except this one. We observed reduced identification performance when only the saccade-target placeholder disappeared after the saccade. In Experiment two, we changed one placeholder location (inward/outward shift or rotation re. saccade vector) after the saccade and observed that identification performance decreased with increased shift/rotation of the saccade-target placeholder. We conclude that pre-saccadic memory is disrupted by abrupt attention-capturing post-saccadic changes of visual scene, particularly when these changes involve the object prioritized by being the goal of a saccade. These findings support the notion that limited trans-saccadic memory resources are disrupted when object correspondence at saccadic goal is broken through removal or location change.

The spatial properties of adaptation-induced distance compression

“…Previous work suggests that world-centered aftereffects can be fragile, for phenomena such as duration compression ( Bruno, Ayhan, & Johnston, 2010 ; Burr, Tozzi, & Morrone, 2007 ), motion ( Knapen, Rolfs, & Cavanagh, 2009 ; Turi & Burr, 2012 ), and tilt aftereffects ( Knapen, Rolfs, Wexler, & Cavanagh, 2010 ; Melcher, 2005 ), although reasons for these inconsistent findings in previous work and this work are not clear. Lack of evidence for an aftereffect in the world-centered reference frame in Experiment 5 is in general agreement with previous work showing that attentional and memory factors can affect the remapping of information about objects in the visual field to world-centered coordinates ( Crespi et al, 2011 ; Laurin et al, 2021 ; Mathot & Theeuwes, 2011 ; Prime, Vesia, & Crawford, 2011 ; Yao, Treue, & Krishna, 2016 ; Yoshimoto & Takeuchi, 2019 ). In Experiment 5 , in comparison to the earlier experiments, there were multiple positions on the screen where stimuli were presented across blocks.…”

Familiar objects benefit more from transsaccadic feature predictions

“…However, it is not always adequate or possible to integrate peripheral and foveal information. When the sampled information from the periphery and the fovea is discrepant (e.g., when the saccade target is displaced or exchanged with another object), the visual system can segregate pre-and postsaccadic information (e.g., Atsma et al, 2016;Demeyer et al, 2010;Laurin et al, 2021;Tas et al, 2012;Tas et al, 2021). Furthermore, in some cases, the visual system samples object information with only peripheral vision (Treisman, 1986), and visual search is surprisingly unaffected by blocking foveal vision (David et al, 2021;Nuthmann, 2014;Nuthmann & Canas-Bajo, 2022).…”