Remapping high-capacity, pre-attentive, fragile sensory memory

Humans typically make several saccades per second. This provides a challenge for the visual system as locations are largely coded in retinotopic (eye-centered) coordinates. Spatial remapping, the updating of retinotopic location coordinates of items in visuospatial memory, is typically assumed to be limited to robust, capacity-limited and attention-demanding working memory (WM). Are pre-attentive, maskable, sensory memory representations (e.g. fragile memory, FM) also remapped? We directly compared trans-saccadic WM (tWM) and trans-saccadic FM (tFM) in a retro-cue change-detection paradigm. Participants memorized oriented rectangles, made a saccade and reported whether they saw a change in a subsequent display. On some trials a retro-cue indicated the to-be-tested item prior to probe onset. This allowed sensory memory items to be included in the memory capacity estimate. The observed retro-cue benefit demonstrates a tFM capacity considerably above tWM. This provides evidence that some, if not all sensory memory was remapped to spatiotopic (world-centered, task-relevant) coordinates. In a second experiment, we show backward masks to be effective in retinotopic as well as spatiotopic coordinates, demonstrating that FM was indeed remapped to world-centered coordinates. Together this provides conclusive evidence that trans-saccadic spatial remapping is not limited to higher-level WM processes but also occurs for sensory memory representations.