Rapid visual adaptation persists across saccades

Neurons in the visual cortex quickly adapt to constant input, which should lead to perceptual fading within few tens of milliseconds. However, perceptual fading is rarely observed in everyday perception, possibly because eye movements refresh retinal input. Recently, it has been suggested that amplitudes of large saccadic eye movements are scaled to maximally decorrelate presaccadic and postsaccadic inputs and thus to annul perceptual fading. However, this argument builds on the assumption that adaptation within naturally brief fixation durations is strong enough to survive any visually disruptive saccade and affect perception. We tested this assumption by measuring the effect of luminance adaptation on postsaccadic contrast perception. We found that postsaccadic contrast perception was affected by presaccadic luminance adaptation during brief periods of fixation. This adaptation effect emerges within 100 milliseconds and persists over seconds. These results indicate that adaptation during natural fixation periods can affect perception even after visually disruptive saccades.