Spreading pre-saccadic attentional resources without trade-off

When preparing a saccade, attentional resources are focused at the saccade target and its immediate vicinity. Here we show that this does not hold true when saccades are prepared towards a recently extinguished target. We obtained detailed maps of orientation sensitivity when participants prepared a saccade toward a target that either remained on the screen or disappeared before the eyes moved. We found that attention was mainly focused at the immediate surround of the visible target and increasingly spread to more peripheral locations as a function of the delay between the target’s disappearance and the saccade. Interestingly, this spread was accompanied by an overall increase in sensitivity, speaking against a dilution of limited resources over a larger spatial area. We hypothesize that these results reflect the behavioral consequences of the spatio-temporal dynamics of visual receptive fields in the presence and in the absence a structured visual cue.