V4 activity before saccades

Activity in V4 reflects the direction, but not the latency, of saccades during visual search.

We constantly make eye movements to bring objects of interest onto the fovea for more detailed processing. Activity in area V4, a prestriate visual area, is enhanced at the location corresponding to the target of an eye movement. However, the precise role of activity in V4 in relation to these saccades and the modulation of other cortical areas in the oculomotor system remains unknown. V4 could...

Selective enhancement of orientation tuning before saccades.

Saccadic eye movements cause a rapid sweep of the visual image across the retina and bring the saccade's target into high-acuity foveal vision. Even before saccade onset, visual processing is selectively prioritized at the saccade target. To determine how this presaccadic attention shift exerts its influence on visual selection, we compare the dynamics of perceptual tuning curves before movemen...

Adaptive deployment of spatial and feature-based attention before saccades

What you see depends not only on where you are looking but also on where you will look next. The pre-saccadic attention shift is an automatic enhancement of visual sensitivity at the target of the next saccade. We investigated whether and how perceptual factors independent of the oculomotor plan modulate pre-saccadic attention within and across trials. Observers made saccades to one (the target...

Primate frontal eye fields. I. Single neurons discharging before saccades.

We studied the activity of single neurons in the frontal eye fields of awake macaque monkeys trained to perform several oculomotor tasks. Fifty-four percent of neurons discharged before visually guided saccades. Three different types of presaccadic activity were observed: visual, movement, and anticipatory. Visual activity occurred in response to visual stimuli whether or not the monkey made sa...

Control of Attention before Reflexive and Intentional Saccades