Abstract

We experience visual stability despite shifts of the visual array across the retina produced by eye movements.
A process known as remapping is thought to keep track of the spatial locations of objects as they
move on the retina. We explored remapping in damaged visual cortex by presenting a stimulus in the
blind field of two patients with hemianopia. When they executed a saccadic eye movement that would
bring the stimulated location into the sighted field, reported awareness of the stimulus increased, even
though the stimulus was removed before the saccade began and so never actually fell in the sighted
field. Moreover, when a location was primed by a blind-field stimulus and then brought into the sighted
field by a saccade, detection sensitivity for near-threshold targets appearing at this location increased
dramatically. The results demonstrate that brain areas supporting conscious vision are not necessary
for remapping, and suggest visual stability is maintained for salient objects even when they are not
consciously perceived.