Perceptual continuity across saccades: evidence for rapid spatiotopic updating

The retinotopic organization of visual information is shifted with each saccade. Yet, we experience a continuous stream of visual information. The discrepancy between the disrupted retinotopic organization and apparent perceptual continuity of visual information has been studied for centuries. It is still debated whether perceptual continuity across saccades is illusory, or whether retinotopic information is updated across saccades. Recent studies provided considerable evidence in favour of spatiotopic updating. Importantly, these studies showed that the build-up of spatiotopic coding takes up to 500 ms, plus saccade latency.
Here, we challenge this view by showing that spatiotopic updating occurs within saccade latency. In our experiments, we used the High Phi illusion, where the random texture of a slowly rotating annulus is replaced with four different random textures. Even though the textures are not correlated, the slow rotation induces a strong percept of a large backward jump upon changing the textures. We showed that the illusory backward jump can be induced spatiotopically, and crucially that this updating can be detected even when the presaccadic inducer interval is as short as the saccade latency. These results provide evidence for rapid spatiotopic updating across saccades in much shorter regime than previously assumed.