Evidence for Optimal Integration of Visual Feature Representations across Saccades

Abstract

This study examines the consequences of saccadic eye movements for the internal representation of visual objects. A saccade shifts the image of a stable visual object from one part of the retina to another. We show that visual representations are built up over these different views of the same object, by combining information obtained before and after each saccade. The weights given to presaccadic and postsaccadic information are determined by the relative reliability of each input. This provides evidence that the visual system combines inputs over time in a statistically optimal way.