An interesting 100 milliseconds in which to examine vision and attention

Amelia Hunt

Vision Sciences Lab, Harvard University

Although we perceive the world as stable, visual information is displaced on the retina each time the eyes move. Neurophysiological studies have revealed shifts in receptive fields throughout retinotopically-organized visual areas that anticipate each eye movement by as much as 100ms. This means that during this brief interval before an eye movement, two retinotopic maps exist simultaneously: One based on incoming visual input, and one based on predicted, post-saccadic visual input. I will describe some recent and ongoing studies probing the visual experience of human observers at this moment in time, and speculate about the function of this remapping process.