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Updated: Feb 28, 2026
06:46
Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity
Published on: March 18, 2019
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Pre-saccadic perception: Separate time courses for enhancement and spatial pooling at the saccade target
Antimo Buonocore1,2, Alessio Fracasso3,4, David Melcher5
1Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Tübingen University, Tübingen, Germany.
Plos One
|June 15, 2017
Summary
Eye movements enhance visual perception at the saccade target, improving performance and causing spatial compression. These findings reveal how the visual system prepares for future visual input during natural scene exploration.
Area of Science:
- Visual neuroscience
- Human psychophysics
Background:
- The visual system processes information differently for future saccade targets.
- Reported effects include enhancement, un-masking, un-crowding, and spatial compression.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the time course of visual processing changes associated with saccadic eye movements.
- To measure orientation discrimination under conditions of spatial crowding and temporal masking.
Main Methods:
- Four experiments manipulated target-flanker distance, masking, flanker orientation, and saccade execution.
- Orientation discrimination was measured for targets in crowded or masked conditions.
- Performance was compared between fixation and saccade trials.
Main Results:
- Masking and random flanker orientation reduced performance in both fixation and saccade conditions.
- Saccade trials showed a small performance improvement, consistent with enhancement at the saccade target.
- A performance decrement near saccade onset, with random flankers, suggested spatial pooling towards the saccade target.
Conclusions:
- Results support an early, general enhancement at the saccade target.
- Later, peri-saccadic compression/pooling towards the saccade target was also observed.
- Strong evidence for un-crowding was not found.
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