Rapid visual adaptation persists across saccades

Abstract

Summary Neurons in the visual cortex quickly adapt to constant input, which should lead to perceptual fading within few tens of milliseconds. However, perceptual fading is rarely observed in everyday perception, possibly because eye movements refresh retinal input. Recently, it has been suggested that amplitudes of large saccadic eye movements are scaled to maximally decorrelate presaccadic and postsaccadic inputs and thus to annul perceptual fading. However, this argument builds on the assumption that adaptation within naturally brief fixation durations is strong enough to survive any visually disruptive saccade and affect perception. We tested this assumption by measuring the effect of luminance adaptation on postsaccadic contrast perception. We found that postsaccadic contrast perception was affected by presaccadic luminance adaptation during brief periods of fixation. This adaptation effect emerges within 100 milliseconds and persists over seconds. These results indicate that adaptation during natural fixation periods can affect perception even after visually disruptive saccades.

Presaccadic attention enhances contrast sensitivity, but not at the upper vertical meridian

“…Perceptual measurements are typically made at locations along the horizontal meridian. Likewise, studies investigating saccades (including those on presaccadic attention) typically rely on horizontal eye movements (e.g., Deubel and Schneider, 1996 ; Rolfs and Carrasco, 2012 ; Li et al., 2016 , 2021b ; Hanning et al., 2019b ; Ohl et al., 2017 ; Hübner and Schütz, 2021 ) or place the saccade targets around the visual field but do not investigate the effect of saccade direction (e.g., Kowler et al., 1995 ; Wollenberg et al., 2018 ; Hanning et al., 2019a ). However, the existence of perceptual performance fields, as well as the current presaccadic data, question the generalizability of these findings and call for a systematic study of eye movements not only across eccentricity but also around the visual field.…”