RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Increasing suppression of saccade-related transients along the human visual hierarchy
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 124867
DO 10.1101/124867
A1 Tal Golan
A1 Ido Davidesco
A1 Meir Meshulam
A1 David M Groppe
A1 Pierre Mégevand
A1 Erin M Yeagle
A1 Matthew S Goldfinger
A1 Michal Harel
A1 Lucia Melloni
A1 Charles E Schroeder
A1 Leon Y Deouell
A1 Ashesh D Mehta
A1 Rafael Malach
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/31/124867.abstract
AB A key hallmark of visual perceptual awareness is robustness to instabilities arising from unnoticeable eye and eyelid movements. In previous human intracranial (iEEG) work (Golan et al., 2016) we found that excitatory broadband high-frequency activity transients, driven by eye blinks, are suppressed in higher-level but not early visual cortex. Here, we utilized the broad anatomical coverage of iEEG recordings in 12 eye-tracked neurosurgical patients to test whether a similar stabilizing mechanism operates following small saccades. We compared saccades (1.3°-3.7°) initiated during inspection of large individual visual objects with similarly-sized external stimulus displacements. Early visual cortex sites responded with positive transients to both conditions. In contrast, in both dorsal and ventral higher-level sites the response to saccades (but not to external displacements) was suppressed. These findings indicate that early visual cortex is highly unstable compared to higher-level visual regions which apparently constitute the main target of stabilizing extra-retinal oculomotor influences.