Short- and long-term plasticity of eye position information: examining perceptual, attentional, and motor influences...

Spatial vision requires information about eye position to account for eye movements. But integrating eye position information and information about objects in the world is imperfect and can lead to transient misperceptions around the time of saccadic eye movements most likely because the signals are prone to temporal errors making it difficult to tell when the retinas move relative to when retinal images move. To clarify where this uncertainty comes from, in four experiments we examined influences of eye posture, attentional cueing, and trial history on perisaccadic misperceptions. We found evidence for one longer-term modulation of perisaccadic shift that evolved over the time of the test session due to biased eye posture. Another, short-term influence on perisaccadic shift was related to eye posture during preceding trials or the direction of the preceding saccade. Both perceptual effects could not be explained with visual delays, influences of attention or changes in saccade metrics. Our data are consistent with the idea that perisaccadic shift is caused by neural representations of eye position or space that are plastic and that arise from non-motor, extraretinal mechanisms. This suggests a perceptual system that continuously calibrates itself in response to changes in oculomotor and muscle systems to reconstruct a stable percept of the world.