Stimulus blanking improves orientation discrimination of foveal and peripheral stimuli

Across a saccadic eye movement, two successive images of the world fall on the retina, one before (presaccadic image) and one after (postsaccadic image) the saccade. Converging evidence suggests that task-relevant visual features of the presaccadic image are available after saccades to be integrated with the postsaccadic image. One way to uncover the availability of presaccadic visual information after saccades is the blanking procedure: Introducing a brief (200ms) interruption in the stimulus presentation at saccade onset drastically improves the discrimination of transsaccadic changes of stimulus features. This feature-blanking effect was studied when transsaccadic changes affected the saccade target itself (Grzeczkowski, Deubel, & Szinte, 2020), a natural yet special condition in which the stimulus is first presented in the periphery and then in foveal vision after the saccade. Here, we asked whether a comparable trans-saccadic feature-blanking effect is apparent for stimuli presented in the same spatiotopic location in the periphery. Observers made a saccade to a saccade target (small dot) presented either to the left or right side of fixation. On each trial, we presented a Gabor grating either in the same location as the saccade target (foveal condition) or at a location above or below the horizontal saccade vector (peripheral condition), thus changing visual hemispheres across the saccade. Observers discriminated the change in orientation of the Gabor (ranging from 1 to 21 degrees) occurring during the saccade. Moreover, the postsaccadic Gabor was either presented with or without a blank. Performance was slightly lower in the peripheral as compared to the foveal condition. More importantly, however, feature blanking was equally effective in both the foveal and peripheral conditions, greatly improving observers’ ability to detect the transsaccadic orientation changes. These results demonstrate that the transsaccadic availability of task-relevant features is not limited to the saccade target and can operate across brain hemispheres.