Post-Saccadic Disruption of Semantic Category Information in Naturalistic Scenes

During natural vision, people make saccades to efficiently sample visual information from complex scenes. However, a substantial body of evidence has shown impaired visual information processing around the time of a saccade. It remains unclear how saccades affect the processing of high-level visual attributes - such as semantic category information - which are essential for navigating dynamic environments and supporting complex behavioral goals. Here, we investigated whether/how the processing of semantic category information in naturalistic scenes is altered immediately after a saccade. Through both human behavioral and neuroimaging studies, we compared semantic category judgments (Experiments 1A and 1B) and neural representations (Experiment 2) for scene images presented at different time points following saccadic eye movements. In the behavioral experiments, we found a robust reduction in scene categorization accuracy when the scene image was presented within 50 ms after saccade completion. In the neuroimaging experiment, we examined neural correlates of semantic category information in the visual system using fMRI multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA). We found that scene category representations embedded in the neural activity patterns of the parahippocampal place area (PPA) were degraded for images presented with a short (0-100 ms) compared to a long post-saccadic delay (400-600 ms), despite no corresponding reduction in overall activation levels. Together, these findings reveal that post-saccadic disruption extends beyond basic visual features to high-level visual attributes of naturalistic scenes, highlighting a limitation of visual information processing in the short post-saccadic period before executing the next saccade.