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Different computations underlie overt presaccadic and covert spatial attention

Nature Human Behaviour volume 5, pages 1418–1431 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Perception and action are tightly coupled: visual responses at the saccade target are enhanced right before saccade onset. This phenomenon, presaccadic attention, is a form of overt attention—deployment of visual attention with concurrent eye movements. Presaccadic attention is well-documented, but its underlying computational process remains unknown. This is in stark contrast to covert attention—deployment of visual attention without concurrent eye movements—for which the computational processes are well characterized by a normalization model. Here, a series of psychophysical experiments reveal that presaccadic attention modulates visual performance only via response gain changes. A response gain change was observed even when attention field size increased, violating the predictions of a normalization model of attention. Our empirical results and model comparisons reveal that the perceptual modulations by overt presaccadic and covert spatial attention are mediated through different computations.

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Fig. 1: Different forms of attentional modulation on contrast response functions.
Fig. 2: Experiment 1.
Fig. 3: Experiment 2.
Fig. 4: Experiment 2.
Fig. 5: Experiment 3.
Fig. 6: Performance binned by target location in high-uncertainty condition.
Fig. 7: Models and models’ fits.
Fig. 8: Model comparison using AIC.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this paper are available at https://github.com/hsinhungli/overt-covert-attention.

Code availability

The analysis code used in this paper is available at https://github.com/hsinhungli/overt-covert-attention.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health grant R01EY019693 (to M.C.). H.-H.L. was supported by NIH grant R90DA043849. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the paper. We thank members of the Carrasco Laboratory, in particular A. Fernández, N. Hanning and M. Jigo.

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  1. Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Hsin-Hung Li, Jasmine Pan & Marisa Carrasco

  2. Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Hsin-Hung Li & Marisa Carrasco

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H.-H.L. and M.C. conceptualized and designed the experiments. H.-H.L. and J.P. conducted the experiments and analysed the data. H.-H.L., J.P. and M.C. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Hsin-Hung Li.

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Li, HH., Pan, J. & Carrasco, M. Different computations underlie overt presaccadic and covert spatial attention. Nat Hum Behav 5, 1418–1431 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01099-4

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