Dissociable contribution of extrastriate responses to representational enhancement of gaze targets

Abstract

Before saccadic eyemovements, our perception of the saccade targets is enhanced. Changes in the visual representation of saccade targets, which presumably underlie this perceptual benefit, emerge even before the eye begins to move. This perisaccadic enhancement has been shown to involve changes in the response magnitude, selectivity, and reliability of visual neurons. In this study, we quantified multiple aspects of perisaccadic changes in the neural response, including gain, feature tuning, contrast response function, reliability, and correlated activity between neurons. Wethen assessed the contributions of these various perisaccadic modulations to the population’s enhanced perisaccadic representation of saccade targets. We found a partial dissociation between the motor information, carried entirely by gain changes, and visual information,which depended on all three types ofmodulation. These findings expand our understanding of the perisaccadic enhancement of visual representations and further support the existence of multiple sources of motor modulation and visual enhancement within extrastriate visual cortex.