Neural Representations of Covert Attention across Saccades: Comparing Pattern Similarity to Shifting and Holding Attention during Fixation

Abstract We can focus visuospatial attention by covertly attending to relevant locations, moving our eyes, or both simultaneously. How does shifting versus holding covert during fixation compare with maintaining across saccades? acquired human fMRI data a combined saccade and task. On Eyes-fixed trials, participants either held at the same initial location (“hold attention”) shifted another midway through trial (“shift attention”). Eyes-move made trial, while in one of two reference frames: “retinotopic attention” condition involved fixation-relative but different screen-centered location, whereas “spatiotopic on relative fixation. localized brain network sensitive shifts (shift > hold attention), used multivoxel pattern time course (MVPTC) analyses investigate patterns activity for spatiotopic retinotopic saccades. In shift network, we found transient information about whether were saccades executed. Moreover, this conditions represented more similarly than attention. An exploratory searchlight analysis revealed additional regions where was relatively similar holding. Thus, may involve types updating that vary similarity “hold” “shift” signals regions.