Perceptual continuity across saccades

Abstract

How perceptual continuity across saccades emerges from the visual system is a longstanding question in visual neuroscience. As the experiments in this thesis support, this most likely arises from the interaction of retinal and extra-retinal signals, resulting in spatiotopic updating of visual information. The presented studies demonstrate that perceptual judgements reflect spatiotopic updating, and that this is robust to selective cortical lesions. In addition to existing suggestions for neural mechanisms underlying spatiotopic updating, I suggest an alternative explanation involving postdictive updating. Together these results provide clear directions for further investigations into perceptual continuity across saccades. The results of these future studies will be of interest to a broad scientific audience, because perceptual continuity across saccades is a case example that organisms dissociate the sensory input that result of changes outside themselves from the sensory input that result of their own motor output. As such, the processes underlying this dissociation might affect humans, ants and squirrels alike.