Saccades reset the priority of visual information to access awareness

Abstract

Subjectively, we experience a stable representation of the outside world across saccades. Although previous studies have reported that presaccadically acquired visual information influences postsaccadic perception, whether such information’s priority to access visual awareness is either reset by each saccade or continuous across saccades remains unclear. To investigate this issue, we combined a breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) with a saccade task. Before each saccade, a grating was presented in the peripheral visual field under suppression. After the saccade, the same grating was again presented under suppression at either the re- tinotopically matched, the spatiotopically matched, or a control location. By measuring the duration of the grating to break through CFS into awareness after a saccade, we could compare the breakthrough times across stimuli presented at the different locations. No difference in the reaction times between the spatiotopic and control location was observed, indicating that a saccade resets the buildup of an object’s priority to access visual awareness. However, a longer breakthrough time was observed for the retinotopic as compared to the control location, suggesting that a form of retinotopic adaptation to the grating suppressed the priority to access visual awareness after a saccade.