Perceptual learning through remapping: How presaccadic updating affects visual processing M Rolfs1, N Murray-Smith2, M Carrasco2 |
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1Bernstein Center & Department of Psychology, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany |
| Perceptual learning is a selective improvement in visual performance across a number of training sessions, which occurs when the same retinal location is stimulated by a particular visual stimulus. We trained observers in a fine orientation discrimination task, each time presenting a Gabor just before a saccadic eye movement. Performance first improved over five days of training and then transferred to an untrained location during a transfer phase, in which no saccade was executed. This transfer was spatially selective and only affected the retinal location that the stimulus in the training phase would have occupied following the eye movement. We argue that this result reveals the visual consequences of predictive remapping, the anticipatory activation of neurons in many retinotopic brain areas when an imminent saccade will bring an attended visual stimulus into their receptive field [Duhamel et al., 1992, Science, 255, 9092]. Currently we are attempting to identify the visual content of remapping, using a variant of the task that compares the sensitivity of transfer to the trained stimulus orientation. |
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