We are excited to announce that our new paper on local changes in orientation tuning before saccades has just appeared in the Journal of Vision. Here is the link. Clara and Sven did worked together extremely well to get this project from conception to publication in less than two years!

In this study, we combined a time-resolved reverse-correlation technique with statistical modeling to explore the nature of a fundamental selective mechanism in active human vision: the anticipatory processing of the next gaze location (or, pre-saccadic attention shift as we often call it). We found that planning a saccadic eye movement involves dynamic changes in perception, including a feature-specific increase in gain and finer orientation tuning at the target, that were not observed at a non-target location. These findings bridge behavioral and neurophysiological mechanisms underlying changing priorities in active visual processing.

We are particularly happy with the result, as it confirms previous results from Marisa Carrasco’s group (Li, Barbot, & Carrasco, 2016) using an entirely different paradigm and extends them by showing that changes in orientation tuning are spatially specific to the target of the eye movement.