Perisaccadic and attentional remapping of receptive fields in lateral intraparietal area and frontal eye fields

Abstract

The nature and function of perisaccadic receptive field (RF) remapping have been controversial. We use a delayed saccade task to reduce previous confounds and examine the remapping time course in the lateral intraparietal area and frontal eye fields. In the delay period, the RF shift direction turns from the initial fixation to the saccade target. In the perisaccadic period, RFs first shift toward the target (convergent remapping), but around the time of saccade onset/offset, the shifts become predominantly toward the post-saccadic RF locations (forward remapping). Thus, unlike forward remapping that depends on the corollary discharge (CD) of the saccade command, convergent remapping appears to follow attention from the initial fixation to the target. We model the data with attention-modulated and CD-gated connections and show that both sets of connections emerge automatically in neural networks trained to update stimulus retinal locations across saccades. Our work thus unifies previous findings into a mechanism for transsaccadic visual stability.

Keywords: CP: Neuroscience; center-surround connections; compressive remapping; coordinate transformation; directional connections; efference copy; perceptual mislocalization; predictive remapping; space constancy; visuomotor interactions; working memory.