Visual attention is available at a task-relevant location rapidly after a saccade

Maintaining attention at a task-relevant spatial location while making eye-movements necessitates a rapid, saccade-synchronized shift of attentional modulation from the neuronal population representing the task-relevant location before the saccade to the one representing it after the saccade. Curren...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tao Yao, Madhura Ketkar, Stefan Treue, B Suresh Krishna
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: eLife Sciences Publications Ltd 2016-11-01
Series:eLife
Subjects:
Online Access:https://elifesciences.org/articles/18009
Description
Summary:Maintaining attention at a task-relevant spatial location while making eye-movements necessitates a rapid, saccade-synchronized shift of attentional modulation from the neuronal population representing the task-relevant location before the saccade to the one representing it after the saccade. Currently, the precise time at which spatial attention becomes fully allocated to the task-relevant location after the saccade remains unclear. Using a fine-grained temporal analysis of human peri-saccadic detection performance in an attention task, we show that spatial attention is fully available at the task-relevant location within 30 milliseconds after the saccade. Subjects tracked the attentional target veridically throughout our task: i.e. they almost never responded to non-target stimuli. Spatial attention and saccadic processing therefore co-ordinate well to ensure that relevant locations are attentionally enhanced soon after the beginning of each eye fixation.
ISSN:2050-084X