Limits of V4 perisaccadic firing rate modulations in explaining perceptual mislocalization

Whether and how various visual sensory areas contribute to the perceived location of visual stimuli remains unknown. To test the role of neurons in extrastriate area V4 in generating alterations in spatial perception during saccadic eye movements (saccades), we examined perisaccadic mislocalization—the perceptual phenomenon in which visual stimuli appearing around the time of a saccade are perceived at a different position than their actual location. We designed and implemented a combined behavioral and electrophysiological framework in non-human primates to directly relate trial-by-trial spatial perception reports during saccades to neuronal firing rates in V4 populations. We measured monkeys’ perception of stimulus location behaviorally and found perisaccadic mislocalization opposite to the saccade direction. We also quantified population responses by computing the center of mass of firing rate activity across probe locations for V4 neurons with receptive fields close to the saccade target. While perisaccadic neuronal responses showed shifts toward the saccade target, these shifts did not systematically vary with the magnitude of perceptual mislocalization across trials. In conclusion, receptive field shifts based on the perisaccadic firing rate of V4 neurons are not sufficient to account for the magnitude of perceptual mislocalization in each trial, suggesting that more complex neural representation of perisaccadic visual information may be critical for linking extrastriate neural activity to saccade-induced perception.