Backward masking and unmasking across saccadic eye movements

Humans make several eye movements every second, and thus a fundamental challenge in conscious vision is to maintain continuity by matching object representations in constantly shifting retinal coordinates [1]. One possible mechanism for visual stability is the remapping of receptive fields around saccade onset, combining pre- and postsaccadic information [2]. The mislocalization of stimuli briefly flashed near the time of saccades [3-7] has been taken as evidence for remapping. Yet the relationship between remapping, mislocalization, and trans-saccadic integration remains unclear. We asked participants to identify a target stimulus presented around the time of saccade onset, which was immediately visually masked by a postsaccadic stimulus presented in the same spatial location (backward masking). Presenting two rapidly occurring events across separate fixations allowed us to investigate how the visual system reconstructs what happens during a saccade. We show that saccadic remapping re...