Canonical retinotopic shifts under an inverse force field explain predictive remapping

ABSTRACT Predictive remapping — the ability of cells in retinotopic brain areas to transiently exhibit spatio-temporal retinotopic shifts beyond the spatial extent of their classical receptive fields — has been proposed as a primary mechanism that stabilizes our percept of the visual world around the time of saccadic eye movements. Despite the well documented effects of predictive remapping, no study to date has been able to provide a mechanistic account of the neural computations and architecture that actively mediate this ubiquitous phenomenon. We propose a novel neurobiologically inspired general model of predictive remapping in which the underlying pre-saccadic attentional and oculomotor signals manifest as three temporally overlapping forces that act on retinotopic brain areas. These three forces – a centripetal one toward the center of gaze, a convergent one toward the saccade target and a translational one parallel to the saccade trajectory – act in an inverse force field and govern the spatio-temporal dynamics of predictive remapping of population receptive fields. The predictions of our model are borne out by the spatio-temporal changes in sensitivity to probe stimuli in human subjects around the time of an eye movement and are consistent with findings of predictive shifts in the receptive fields of cells in the superior colliculus, frontal eye fields, lateral intraparietal area, and visual area V4.