Commentary: Attentional tradeoffs maintain the tracking of moving objects across saccades

In many situations like playing sports or driving a car, we keep track of moving objects, despite the frequent eye movements that drastically interrupt their retinal motion trajectory. Here we report evidence that transsaccadic tracking relies on tradeoffs of attentional resources from a tracked object’s motion path to its remapped location. While participants covertly tracked a moving object, we presented pulses of coherent motion at different locations to probe the allocation of spatial attention along the entire object’s motion path. Changes in the sensitivity for these pulses showed that during fixation, attention shifted smoothly in anticipation of the tracked object’s displacement. However just before a saccade, attentional resources were withdrawn from the object’s current motion path and reflexively drawn to the retinal location the object would have after saccade. This finding demonstrates the predictive choice the visual system makes to maintain the tracking of moving objects across saccades.