Visual masking and visual integration across saccadic eye movements.

The visual world appears unified, stable, and continuous despite rapid changes in eye position. How this is accomplished has puzzled psychologists for over a century. One possibility is that visual information from successive eye fixations is fused in memory according to environmental or spatiotopic coordinates. Evidence supporting this hypothesis was provided by Davidson, Fox, and Dick (1973). They presented a letter array in one fixation and a mask at one letter position in a subsequent fixation and found that the mask inhibited report of the letter that shared its retinal coordinates but appeared to occupy the same position as the letter that shared its spatial coordinates. This suggests the existence of a retinotopic visual persistence at which transsaccadic masking occurs and a spatiotopic visual persistence at which transsaccadic integration, or fusion, occurs. Using a similar procedure, we found retinotopic masking and retinotopic integration: The mask interfered with the letter that shared its retinal coordinates, but also appeared to cover that letter. In another experiment, instead of a mask we presented a bar marker over one letter position, and subjects reported the letter that appeared underneath the bar; subjects usually reported the letter with the same retinal coordinates as the bar, again suggesting retinotopic rather than spatiotopic integration across saccades. In Experiment 3 a bar marker was again presented over one letter position, but in addition a visual landmark was presented after the saccade so that subjects could localize the bar's spatial position; subjects still reported that the letter that shared the bar's retinal coordinates appeared to be under it, but they were also able to accurately specify the bar's spatial position. This ability could have been based on retinal information (the visual landmark) present in the second fixation only, however, rather than spatiotopic visual persistence. Because such a visual landmark was present in the Davidson et al. (1973) experiments, we conclude that their findings can be explained solely in retinotopic terms and provide no convincing evidence for spatiotopic visual persistence. But the exposure parameters that Davidson et al. (1973) and we used were biased in favor of retinotopic, rather than spatiotopic, coding: The stimuli were presented very briefly just before a saccadic eye movement, and subjects are poor at spatially localizing stimuli under these conditions. Thus, in Experiment 4 we presented the letter array about 200 ms before the saccade; then, subjects reported that the letter with the same spatial coordinates as the bar appeared under it.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)