Attention Trade-Off for Localization and Saccadic Remapping

Predictive remapping may be the principal mechanism of maintaining visual stability, and attention is crucial for this process. We aimed to investigate the role of attention in predictive remapping in a dual task paradigm with two conditions, with and without saccadic remapping. The first task was to remember the clock hand position either after a saccade to the clock face (saccade condition requiring remapping) or after the clock being displaced to the fixation point (fixation condition with no saccade). The second task was to report the remembered location of a dot shown peripherally in the upper screen for 1 s. We predicted that performance in the two tasks would interfere in the saccade condition, but not in the fixation condition, because of the attentional demands needed for remapping with the saccade. For the clock estimation task, answers in the saccadic trials tended to underestimate the actual position by approximately 37 ms while responses in the fixation trials were closer to veridical. As predicted, the findings also revealed significant interaction between the two tasks showing decreased predicted accuracy in the clock task for increased error in the localization task, but only for the saccadic condition. Taken together, these results point at the key role of attention in predictive remapping.