Spatiotemporal dynamics of peri-saccadic remapping in humans revealed by classification images

We actively scan our environment with fast ballistic movements called saccades, which create large and rapid displacements of the image on the retina. At the time of saccades, vision becomes transiently distorted in many ways: Briefly flashed stimuli are displaced in space and in time, and spatial and temporal intervals appear compressed. Here we apply the psychophysical technique of classification images to study the spatiotemporal dynamics of visual mechanisms during saccades. We show that saccades cause gross distortions of the classification images. Before the onset of saccadic eye movements, the positive lobes of the images become enlarged in both space and in time and also shifted in a systematic manner toward the pre-saccadic fixation (in space) and anticipated in time by about 50 ms. The transient reorganization creates a spatiotemporal organization oriented in the direction of saccadic-induced motion at the time of saccades, providing a potential mechanism for integrating stimuli across saccades, facilitating stable and continuous vision in the face of constant eye movements.