Tzu-Yao Chiu¹ (), Zitong Lu¹, Julie D. Golomb¹; ¹The Ohio State University

Humans experience the world as stable despite saccade-induced displacements in retinal input. To maintain stability across saccades, the focus of spatial attention needs to be remapped, such that attention at the previous retinotopic (eye-centered) location is removed and updated to reflect the spatiotopic (world-centered) location. Previous behavioral studies showed mixed evidence for both pre-saccadic predictive remapping of attention and retinotopic attentional trace lingering after saccade completion. Here, we used multivariate decoding of EEG alpha-band oscillation to investigate the timecourse of attentional remapping in the peri-saccadic time window. Subjects performed a spatial memory task, in which they memorized a cued peripheral location during sustained fixation periods (no-saccade trials) or across a saccade, with eye-tracking and EEG recordings. Fixation location, saccade direction, and memory cue location randomly varied between trials. Subjects participated in two sessions: one in which they reported the memory cue’s spatiotopic location and another in which they reported its retinotopic location. We trained classifiers to decode the location of spatial attention based on alpha-band oscillation on no-saccade trials, and tested them time-by-time on saccade-trial data to track dynamics of attentional allocation in the peri-saccadic period. In the spatiotopic memory task, we found reliable decoding of the memory cue’s retinotopic location until 400ms after saccade offset, and decoding of the task-relevant spatiotopic location emerging late after saccade completion, consistent with the previously observed retinotopic attentional trace and gradual ramp up of spatiotopic attention. Furthermore, in the retinotopic memory task, we found significant and prolonged decoding of the task-relevant retinotopic location and no spatiotopic decoding, indicating task-dependent remapping of spatiotopic attention. Overall, the current results based on human non-invasive neural recordings provide converging evidence for the gradual remapping of spatial attention after saccades. The current approach further opens ample opportunities to investigate roles of stimulus factors and cognitive control in remapping.

Acknowledgements: NIH R01-EY025648 (JG), NSF 1848939 (JG)