Ohl Sven, Kuper Clara, Rolfs Martin
Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.
Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin, Germany.
J Vis. 2017 Nov 1;17(13):2. doi: 10.1167/17.13.2.
Saccadic eye movements cause a rapid sweep of the visual image across the retina and bring the saccade's target into high-acuity foveal vision. Even before saccade onset, visual processing is selectively prioritized at the saccade target. To determine how this presaccadic attention shift exerts its influence on visual selection, we compare the dynamics of perceptual tuning curves before movement onset at the saccade target and in the opposite hemifield. Participants monitored a 30-Hz sequence of randomly oriented gratings for a target orientation. Combining a reverse correlation technique previously used to study orientation tuning in neurons and general additive mixed modeling, we found that perceptual reports were tuned to the target orientation. The gain of orientation tuning increased markedly within the last 100 ms before saccade onset. In addition, we observed finer orientation tuning right before saccade onset. This increase in gain and tuning occurred at the saccade target location and was not observed at the incongruent location in the opposite hemifield. The present findings suggest, therefore, that presaccadic attention exerts its influence on vision in a spatially and feature-selective manner, enhancing performance and sharpening feature tuning at the future gaze location before the eyes start moving.
扫视眼动会使视觉图像在视网膜上快速扫过，并将扫视目标带入高敏锐度的中央凹视觉。甚至在扫视开始之前，视觉处理就已在扫视目标处被有选择地优先处理。为了确定这种扫视前的注意力转移如何对视觉选择产生影响，我们比较了扫视目标处和对侧半视野在运动开始前感知调谐曲线的动态变化。参与者监测一个30赫兹的随机定向光栅序列以寻找目标方向。结合先前用于研究神经元方向调谐的反向相关技术和通用加法混合建模，我们发现感知报告被调谐到目标方向。在扫视开始前的最后100毫秒内，方向调谐的增益显著增加。此外，我们在扫视开始前观察到更精细的方向调谐。这种增益和调谐的增加发生在扫视目标位置，而在对侧半视野的不一致位置未观察到。因此，目前的研究结果表明，扫视前的注意力以空间和特征选择性的方式对视觉产生影响，在眼睛开始移动之前提高未来注视位置的表现并锐化特征调谐。
