Abstract

The visual world appears unified, stable, and continuous despite rapid changes in eye position. How this is accomplished has puzzled psychologists for over a century. One possibility is that visual information from successive eye fixations is fused in memory according to environmental or spatiotopic coordinates. Evidence supporting this hypothesis was provided by Davidson, Fox, and Dick (1973). They presented a letter array in one fixation and a mask at one letter position in a subsequent fixation and found that the mask inhibited report of the letter that shared its retinal coordinates but appeared to occupy the same position as the letter that shared its spatial coordi-nates. This suggests the existence of a retinotopic visual persistence at which transsac-cadic masking occurs and a spatiotopic visual persistence at which transsaccadic integration, or fusion, occurs. Using a similar procedure, we found retinotopic masking and retinotopic integra-tion: The mask interfered with the letter that shared its retinal coordinates, but also appeared to cover that letter. In another experiment, instead of a mask we presented a bar marker over one letter position, and subjects reported the letter that appeared

Citations