Behavioral and neural correlates of impaired scene perception following saccadic eye movements
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The visual input projected to the retina shifts drastically across saccadic eye movements. Although we are not aware of it, perception of simple visual stimuli presented around the time of a saccade is impaired (Burr et al., 1994). Meanwhile, the extent to which the post-saccadic impairment influences high-level visual scene perception remains unclear. We conducted behavioral and fMRI experiments examining processing for scene images containing different spatial frequency content presented at different delays following a saccade. First, subjects performed a 6-way scene categorization task (beach, mountain, etc.) on images presented 5, 16, 50, 158, or 500 ms after saccade completion. We found lower scene categorization accuracy at 5 ms and 16 ms post-saccadic delays compared to longer delays, for both low- and high-spatial frequency filtered images, suggesting broadly impaired scene perception lasting less than 50 ms after a saccade offset. To further investigate what visual information is impaired, and in the absence of an explicit categorization task, we conducted an fMRI experiment where subjects performed a 1-back task on scene images while making saccades. Short and long post-saccadic delay trials were sorted post-hoc using eye-tracking data. Using RSA-based decoding analysis, we assessed scene category information (urban vs nature) in scene-selective brain areas, and low-level visual information (high vs low spatial frequency) in the early visual cortex. We found decreased scene category information in the posterior parahippocampal place area on short versus long post-saccadic delay trials, consistent with the behavioral impairment. Interestingly, lower-level visual information of a scene image was less impaired; spatial frequency information in the early visual cortex was not significantly different between short and long post-saccadic delay trials. Taken together, the current study presents novel evidence for impaired processing of complex scenes following saccades that may be driven by selectively interrupted neural representations of high-level scene content.
Source: Journal of Vision
Authors: Yong Min Choi, Tzu-Yao Chiu, Julie D. Golomb
Institution: The Ohio State University
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,850
OpenAlex ID: W4402946860