The maintenance of spatial accuracy by the perisaccadic remapping of visual receptive fields

Humans and monkeys can direct their eyes to the spatial location of briefly flashed targets even when a saccade intervenes between the stimulus flash and the saccade to acquire its location. It had been proposed that the oculomotor system performs this task by resorting to a supraretinal representation of space. In this paper we review neurophysiological and clinical data suggesting that the brain can use a different strategy that does not require an explicit supraretinal representation of targets. We propose and implement a simple neural model that can keep track continuously of the location of saccade targets in eye-centered coordinates. Finally, based on recent data, we argue that such a neural mechanism is in fact used to keep track not only of saccade targets but of the location of salient areas of the visual scene in general.