Abstract

This week we will discuss and debate a very recent paper by Zhang and colleagues (2025).

Abstract: “Across saccades, neurons in retinotopically organized visual representations experience drastically different images, but visual percepts remain stable. Here we investigated whether such stability can be mediated, in part, via prediction-error signaling by neurons processing post-saccadic visual images. We specifically recorded from foveal superior colliculus (SC) neurons when a visual image only overlapped with their response fields (RF’s) after foveating saccades but not pre-saccadically. When we rapidly changed the target features intra-saccadically, the foveal neurons’ post-saccadic visual reafferent responses were elevated, even though the neurons did not directly sample the pre-saccadic extrafoveal target features. This effect did not occur in the absence of saccades, and it also scaled with the extent of the introduced intra-saccadic image feature discrepancies. These results suggest that foveal SC neurons may signal a trans-saccadic prediction error when the foveated image stimulating them is inconsistent with that expected from pre-saccadic extrafoveal representations, a potential perceptual stability mechanism” (Zhang et al., 2025).

Reference: Zhang, T., Bogadhi, A. R., & Hafed, Z. M. (2025). Foveal neurons of the monkey superior colliculus signal trans-saccadic prediction errors. PLoS Biology, 23(6), e3003246. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003246