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Updated: May 16, 2026
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Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity
Published on: March 18, 2019
Allocation of attention across saccades
Donatas Jonikaitis1, Martin Szinte, Martin Rolfs
11Allgemeine und Experimentelle Psychologie, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Munich, Germany. donatas.jonikaitis@psy.lmu.de
Journal of Neurophysiology
|December 11, 2012
Summary
Visual attention remaps predictively during eye movements, maintaining focus on targets across saccades. This predictive allocation, not the stimulus itself, guides attention, supporting physiological remapping theories.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Visual Perception
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Spatial attention must track targets during eye movements.
- Transsaccadic updating is crucial for continuous visual awareness.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate how visual attention updates across saccades.
- Determine if attention is predictively allocated to future visual field locations.
Main Methods:
- Used a tilt discrimination task to measure spatial attention allocation.
- Presented salient color cues before saccades.
- Manipulated cue visibility across saccades.
Main Results:
- Attention was allocated to the predicted future retinal location before saccades.
- Attention remained stable at the world location, not the retinal location, across saccades.
- Cue visibility after saccades did not influence attentional allocation, highlighting predictive mechanisms.
Conclusions:
- Visual attention is predictively remapped across saccades.
- This predictive remapping aligns with physiological evidence of neuronal activation.
- Transsaccadic spatial updating is a consequence of physiological remapping.
