View article

With each saccade the position of visual information falling on the retina shifts. Despite these transsaccadic disruptions, we perceive a stable visual world. This stability persists even when stimuli move during saccades, as shown by poor transsaccadic displacement detection (eg, Mack, 1970). In simple stimuli, displacement detection improves dramatically when stimuli briefly disappear at the conclusion of the saccade (eg, Deubel et al., 1994). This “blank” effect is taken as evidence that the visual system assumes stability unless provided contrary evidence like that introduced by the blank period. The present study examined whether a post-saccade blank similarly improves displacement detection in real-world scenes, as the stability assumption hypothesis predicts. In two experiments, participants were cued to move their eyes away from central fixation to the left or right while viewing a real-world scene. On some …