Different computations underlie overt presaccadic and covert spatial attention

Perception and action are tightly coupled: visual responses at the saccade target are enhanced right before saccade onset. This phenomenon, presaccadic attention, is a form of overt attention—deployment of visual attention with concurrent eye movements. Presaccadic attention is well-documented, but...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature human behaviour 2021-10, Vol.5 (10), p.1418-1431
Main Authors: Li, Hsin-Hung, Pan, Jasmine, Carrasco, Marisa
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
631/378/2617/1795
631/378/2649/1310
631/378/3917
631/477/2811
Attention
Behavioral Sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Covert
Deployment
Experimental Psychology
Eye movements
Humans
Life Sciences
Microeconomics
Neurosciences
Normalization
Personality and Social Psychology
Photic Stimulation - methods
Psychomotor Performance
Psychophysics - methods
Saccades - physiology
Spatial attention
Spatial Navigation
Spatial Processing
Visual attention
Visual Perception
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Summary:Perception and action are tightly coupled: visual responses at the saccade target are enhanced right before saccade onset. This phenomenon, presaccadic attention, is a form of overt attention—deployment of visual attention with concurrent eye movements. Presaccadic attention is well-documented, but its underlying computational process remains unknown. This is in stark contrast to covert attention—deployment of visual attention without concurrent eye movements—for which the computational processes are well characterized by a normalization model. Here, a series of psychophysical experiments reveal that presaccadic attention modulates visual performance only via response gain changes. A response gain change was observed even when attention field size increased, violating the predictions of a normalization model of attention. Our empirical results and model comparisons reveal that the perceptual modulations by overt presaccadic and covert spatial attention are mediated through different computations. Overt and covert attention are often considered to be linked. By studying presaccadic attention’s effects on visual performance, Li et al. show that the computations underlying overt presaccadic attention are different from those of covert attention.
ISSN:2397-3374
2397-3374
DOI:10.1038/s41562-021-01099-4