Timmerman Rosanne H, Buonocore Antimo, Fracasso Alessio
Psychology, School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, University of Dundee, Dundee, Scotland.
School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland.
Exp Brain Res. 2025 Sep 11;243(10):210. doi: 10.1007/s00221-025-07152-2.
Visual perception is not homogeneous throughout the visual field. Performance is generally better along the horizontal meridian compared to the vertical meridian, and in the lower compared to the upper visual field. These asymmetries in visual performance are reflected in structural asymmetries in early visual cortex. When exploring a visual scene, eye movements occur continuously, with visual perception resulting from a tight interplay between the visual as well as the oculomotor systems. Literature on visual performance across visual fields during saccades is limited, but existing studies show that perceptual performance during saccades is indistinguishable between the upper and the lower visual fields, or altogether better in the upper visual field compared to lower. In the current exploratory study, we asked participants to detect the direction of target displacement across visual fields, while performing a saccade as well as at fixation. During fixation and saccade viewing conditions, performance on the task was better along the horizontal compared to the vertical meridian. However, we did not observe a robust difference in performance between the lower and upper visual field, neither at fixation nor when participants were requested to perform saccades. We interpret our results based on known behavioural and neural anisotropies, as well as considering evolutionary approaches to the perception-action cycle.
视觉感知在整个视野中并非均匀一致。通常，沿水平子午线的视觉表现优于垂直子午线，且在视野下部的表现优于上部。视觉表现的这些不对称性反映在早期视觉皮层的结构不对称中。在探索视觉场景时，眼球运动会持续发生，视觉感知是视觉系统和动眼系统紧密相互作用的结果。关于扫视过程中跨视野视觉表现的文献有限，但现有研究表明，扫视过程中的感知表现在上部和下部视野之间没有差异，或者与下部视野相比，上部视野的表现总体上更好。在当前的探索性研究中，我们要求参与者在进行扫视以及注视时检测跨视野目标位移的方向。在注视和扫视观察条件下，与垂直子午线相比，任务表现沿水平子午线更好。然而，无论是在注视时还是当要求参与者进行扫视时，我们都没有观察到下部和上部视野之间在表现上有明显差异。我们基于已知的行为和神经各向异性来解释我们的结果，并考虑到感知 - 行动循环的进化方法。
