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Abstract
Displacement of a visual target during a saccadic eye movement is normally detected
only at a high threshold, implying that high-quality information about target position
is not stored in the nervous system across the saccade. We show that blanking the
target for 50-300 msec after a saccade restores sensitivity to the displacement. With
blanking, subjects reliably detect displacements as small as 0.33 deg across 6 deg
eye movements, with correspondingly steep psychophysical functions. Performance with
blanking in a fixation control is inferior, evidence for a saccadic enhancement of
sensitivity to image displacement. If blanking is delayed so that the target is visible
immediately after the saccade in its displaced position, performance declines to non-blanking
levels. Blanking the target before the saccade, and restoring it during the saccade,
yields a similar but weaker effect. We interpret these results with a model in which
the visual system searches for the postsaccadic goal target within a restricted spatiotemporal
window. If it is not found, the assumption of stationarity of the world is broken
and the system makes use of other information such as extraretinal signals for calibrating
location.