Saccades create similar mislocalizations in visual and auditory space

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Sensory processing
• Oculomotor research

Background:

• Effortless sensory orientation relies on converting head/body coordinates to eye-based coordinates.
• The role of oculomotor representation in sound localization, especially without a saccade, is unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if oculomotor representations influence sound localization.
• To determine if saccades induce similar localization errors for visual and auditory stimuli.

Main Methods:

• Sixteen subjects judged the direction of visual or auditory apparent motion.
• Stimuli were presented during fixation or straddling a saccade.

Main Results:

• Saccades introduced significant errors in direction judgments for both visual and auditory stimuli.
• Apparent motion judgments were biased in the direction of the saccade for both modalities.

Conclusions:

• Saccade-induced localization errors suggest shared cross-modal location coding.
• This shared coding may integrate perception and action across sensory modalities.