Spatiotemporal Predictability of Saccades Modulates Post-Saccadic Feature Interference

Spatial attention and eye movements jointly contribute to efficient sampling of visual information in the environment, but maintaining precise spatial attention across saccades becomes challenging due to the drastic retinal shifts. Previous studies provided evidence that spatial attention may remap imperfectly across saccades, incurring systematic feature inference to ongoing perception, yet the role of saccadepredictability remains largely untested. In the current study, we investigated whether spatiotemporal predictability of saccades influences post-saccadic remapping and feature perception. In two pre- registered experiments, we implemented the post-saccadic feature report paradigm and manipulated spatiotemporal predictability of saccades. Experiment 1 manipulated spatial and temporal saccade predictability together, whereas Experiment 2 dissociated the roles of spatial and temporal predictability in separate conditions, respectively. In addition to spatial and temporal saccade predictability both improving general task performance, we found that spatial saccade predictability specifically modulated post-saccadic feature interference. When saccades were spatially unpredictable, there were “swap errors” at the early post-saccadic timepoint, where participants misreported the retinotopic color instead of the spatiotopic target color. However, the swapping errors were reduced when saccades were made spatially predictable. These results suggest that systematic feature interference associated with post-saccadic remapping is malleable to expectations of the upcoming saccade target location, highlighting the role of predictions in maintaining perceptual stability across saccades.