Perceiving a stable world through the predictive allocation of attention
Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
Final Report Abstract
In order to perceive and act in our complex environment, the perceptual system has to deal with the consequences of our own movements. In particular, we perceive our world as stable and continuous despite frequently made eye, head or body movements that drastically change the projections of external objects positions on our sensory receptors (e.g. our eyes and ears). The question is how this stable representation is built in our brain and how we recover the position of objects in the world across different gaze shifts. Neuropysiological studies have shown that neurons in some cortical and sub-cortical areas are able to anticipate the consequences that voluntary eye movements have on their visual input. Importantly, it seems that these neurons predict how the world will look after a saccade by remapping the location of each attended object to the place (in retinal coordinates) it will occupy following a saccade. Our previous research has allowed us to model remapping as an attentional process and has led to the development of efficient psychophysical methods to study the allocation of attention at the time of a saccade. Using these tools as well as state-of-the-art equipment, a first set of the present studies was aimed to demonstrate the mandatory involvement of visual attention in our ability to track (i.e., to remap) locations across a saccade. Indeed, our results demonstrate that attention directed to an object in space is predictivly remapped before the saccade, in a spatially highly specific manner. In the second series of studies we wanted to investigate whether our remapping model would also apply to other sensory modalities (in particular, audition). Our results indeed suggest that eye-centered oculomotor maps remap auditory targets across saccades, in order to keep track of sound and/or light positions by remapping eye-centered representations across saccades. They therefore support a model in which different modalities are tracked in a single eyecentered visual reference frame. Such a supra-modal topological map could allow multi-sensory space constancy via predictive remapping of locations as a function of their ability to attract spatial attention rather than as a function of their modality. We also show that averaging saccades, landing between two targets, are not associated with attentional facilitation at the saccade endpoint. Rather, attention before averaging saccades was equally deployed at the two target locations. This reveals that visual attention is not obligatorily coupled to the endpoint of a subsequent saccade.
Publications
- (2016). Remapping attention pointers: Linking physiology and behavior. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(6), 399-401
Rolfs, M & Szinte, M
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.04.003) - (2018). Pre-saccadic remapping relies on dynamics of spatial attention. eLife, 7, e37598
Szinte, M., Jonikaitis, D., Rangelov, D., & Deubel, H.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.37598.001) - (2018). Visual attention is not deployed at the endpoint of averaging saccades. PLoS Biology, 16(6): e2006548
Wollenberg, L., Deubel, H., & Szinte, M.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2006548) - (2019). Investigating the deployment of visual attention before accurate and averaging saccades via eye tracking and assessment of visual sensitivity. Journal of Visualized Experiments, 145, e59162
Wollenberg, L., Deubel, H., & Szinte, M.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3791/59162) - (2019). Sensitivity measures of visuospatial attention. Journal of Vision, 19(12), 17
Hanning, N. M., Deubel, H., & Szinte, M.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1167/19.12.17) - (2019). The spread of presaccadic attention depends on the spatial configuration of the visual scene. Scientific Reports, 9(1), 14034
Szinte, M., Puntiroli, M., & Deubel, H.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-50541-1)
